Mike Andrew Consulting

Control Freak Webmasters

By mike, Mar 17 in blog with 0 comments

I’ve written about this topic before and it is one of my pet hates, small business owners who pay webmasters to build web sites for them and then are never given access to the files or the “engine room” of the site to be able to make on page SEO changes and more importantly get the site better rankings on search engines such as Google.

SEO is not set and forget, because you need to constantly make changes and massage pages on your site.

It’s my opinion that you the business, owns the web site, so take, no, demand control over your web sites destiny.

Well here is another example of control wielded by a webmaster and the hosting company they own. I’ve been engaged to do some SEO work on a very poorly designed site that caters to the holiday accommodation and booking industry, the site has never ranked for it’s keyword or category and the business owners have no access to any of the files that need to be changed to be able to optimise the site correctly.

Now it seems that in most cases when someone outside of these companies is asked do some SEO work, the webmasters controlling the site get very precious and uncooperative, is that because we might find out how poorly the site was designed and how badly ripped off you the site owner has been? I think so.

After identifying the keyword phrases we wanted to optimise the home page for, we needed to contact the web master to get access to the index and header files on the site, to change the title tag and the meta description tag.

Access to these files was not provided to the owner by the webmaster so on their behalf I sent an email off to the company requesting access to the files, I received a response and now I’m going to share with you what I received from this company;

“Hi,

everything I can find on the net advises against using it. I may remove it again after doing a bit more research – unless you can come up with a compelling reason to leave it there.

“The Meta Title (<META NAME=”title”…> Some say that having this tag on your pages will give you a boost in the Search Engines Result Pages (SERPs); however, according to my testing while both Yahoo! and MSN index this tag the results are inconsistent. And as such, it is impossible to conclusively determine the Meta Title Tag’s effect on the algorithm.

Recommendation: Either use with caution or don’t use. While the Meta Title Tag seems to be favored among the SEOs in India, the SEO boost as a Google Meta Tag it is supposed to give is nonexistent according to my testing.

Personally, I don’t use the tag as I see no benefits and have seen some instances of lower ranking in using it. “

Huh, I’m sorry but you will make these decisions!!

This response just goes to show how much of an understanding this company has of what elements of SEO are important, the title tag has a very high value and one of the more important aspects of on page optimisation, yet this person is making a statement that he sees no personal benefit of its value and he will make the decision as to whether to allow access to the tag, so I ask the question, Who owns the site?

If this web design company had done the SEO of this site properly in the first place, it would not have been necessary to hire an outside SEO company, but to make decisions about what access we can have without consulting the owner of the site has me shaking my head.

My recommendation to you is check out what you have access to and what you don’t, and then demand that you get complete control over your web site, after all you pay for it.

If you are looking at getting a web site redesign, I would suggest you get someone who knows SEO to look over the site first to make sure that it is search engine friendly, changes to the design before it’s built can save you time and money getting it to index properly with all search engines.

Not all webmasters are like this example, these guys pray on you because you don’t have enough knowledge to know better and that is where they win.

There is a post script to this story, the web company has refused to allow the Tittle tag to be changed, they will not give us access to the files on the site, even though the owner has given us written permission. The result is we’ll redesign the site, fire the hosting and design company and start again, all so unnecessary.

About the author

Mike Andrew has been working with the Internet and small business for over 12 years. Mike has been a keynote speaker at conventions and seminars and conducted social media training sessions all over the world. Mike has an extensive media background having worked in electronic media for over 30 years. Mike specialises in social media and Internet marketing strategy, SEO techniques and search engine marketing campaigns. His articles appear on numerous blogs around the web as well as national magazines.