Trust but verify. Look at your web site code for telltale signs of disaster.

Earlier this year a local investor and media relations firm hired me to answer one question. Why after spending $30,000 in two years on their web site were they unable to attract organic search engine traffic?

I pulled up the web site and viewed the source code. It took me only ten seconds to find the answer. The developers had constructed the site in such a way that the content would display in a visitors browser but was not being written into the code of the page where search engine spiders look to gather it up. When the search engine visited it found nothing more than a few instructions and some structural code. No navigation. No content.

A horrifying development for my client. But I see this type of thing all the time. Programmers by nature are trained to develop by writing code. They are not generally trained in SEO, usability, conversion or other essential components of online marketing. This is no dig on developers. Simply the reality of our educational institutions.

The good news here is once it was brought to the developers attention it wasn’t a very hard fix. But the implications are huge for any business when this happens. Now that we fixed the issue and applied a healthy dose of SEO strategies they company is enjoying a ranking surge including page one’s in Yahoo and Google.

Go to your web site right now. In your browser menu find view>source. What do you see?