Beware of Online Website Builders
Some of the most comment calls that Shoreline Media Marketing gets are questions like Why isn’t my website working?, Or Why isnt my website searching?, Even the “My website is horrible please help me” phone calls are crazy.
After doing some research on a few different sites we have noticed that because some people or some companies think that websites are so expensive they turn to online website builders. Some of the smaller companies even charge you for website building when all they are doing is creating you an account on an online website builder and building what you can build in minutes for you. Most of these sites are only about $100 to maybe $200 a year and most are not something you want to use when advertising your company or trying to build a strong web presence.
If it is a personal site where appearance and search or even marketing doesnt really matter than an online website builder might be just for you. If it is a company or small business trying to build an online community and gain more phone calls, and generate more leads then take our advice and stay away.
One of the sites we found somewhat funny when researching the pros and cons of some of these online web builders was a site called Wix.com, again a great site for personal use but not for a business. Their one advertising line that came across as a false advertising comment and to be completley false was “Search Engine Friendly” Which we highlighted in the image below.
We thought to ourselves. What? Was this company saying to the public that there “Flash” sites are search engine friendly? Talk about false advertisement. Every professional knows that flash is flashy and it looks cool but lets face it search engines don’t like it as much as some people. A mojority of designers or actual website developers do not design in flash. They might use a flash component such as an image but not an entire site.
Your business is something that is advertising you, advertising your company. You want people to find you. You want to be marketed on the web. Building a website or Optimizing a website shouldnt be something that is done with an online site builder such as these. It is something that should be branded twards your business to helpy ou generate those leads and those phone calls.
Here is an interesting article we came across written by David Odonnell on these kind of sites.
I can see the appeal of the service, it actually makes creating a website from scratch easy enough for most people to be able to produce something presentable, in little time. But the trouble comes when they expect search engine traffic as well as a professional looking site. These are far from professional. Fist let me clarify, I’m describing Wix’s premium paid service in this post. I can’t imagine anyone half serious about their business or website using the free service, as you cannot use your own domain name and the free version plasters your site in wix ads.
So, what exactly makes Wix websites so search engine unfriendly?
One Page Only
Wix and other online website builders limits the amount of keywords and pages you can rank for, because in the eyes of the search engines it is just one page that utilises flash to imitate several pages. The code for every page of a wix site, is contained within one page. Typically when optimizing a website, I consider which pages to optimise for certain keywords. You have no such option with Wix. You get one page to optimise for all of your keywords – which is severely limits your search engine traffic / ranking potential.
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