The Joys of SEO
So I've done two family business websites, and Google was kind to one of them, but not the other. This post, I'm not going to lie, honestly is to lend a little of my pagerank, but it's also to discuss the powerful nature of Google.
My brother back before the summer exchanged some free food in exchange for a website for the restaurant he is a sous chef at. A great deal, in my opinion, and he's happy with the site.
My sister opened her own pediatrics office in Frisco, TX. Originally she used her community's name and added "Pediatrics" to it. Unfortunately, smoeone had a national trademark on that name, which is why I'm sidestepping actually calling out the name. Unfortunately that meant that she needed to change domain names, and I think that's where our problem surfaced.
BestNest Pediatrics took forever to get added to the index. I tried everything I could, creating sitemaps, updating meta descriptions, using the webmaster tools to initiate the "change of name" from the old name to the new name. Nothing, nada.
It finally showed up in the index last night, but only partially. I did a few more tweaks, and hopefully my SEO skills have worked. But this process is a bit worrysome to me, partially because I don't know why it took so long in the first place.
This somewhat illustrates to me that without the proper knowledge, you can't create a simple website and hope for it to show up without getting tons of incoming links. Pagerank does give nice results, but it can also hide obscure information. Additionally, because the web is so big, Google does have to pick and choose what to keep in its index. Even Google can't store the entire internet on its massive infrastructure.
Perhaps I'm worrying about nothing, but it seems like the internet has lost its accessibility to a random bloke creating a website. It seems like you must use online communities to gain any amount of notice, and slowly build your community of friends. But I don't think this is an option for some people.
What do you guys think? Has the web lost its ease of entry because of the need of SEO?
Discuss | Posted on Tuesday, August 11, 2009, in seo, websites
