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Duncan, the Debate has Continued
By Beth Strukelj | July 30, 2008
Duncan Morris and his colleague Will are having a debate in regards to ‘site review’. Sorry Duncan, but I have to agree with Will - separating the site review into ‘Technical Review’ and ‘Keyword Targeting Review’ is a good practice.
I don’t know about you but when we deal with clients, we have a marketing team and an IT team more often than not. Some marketing members are not technically savvy enough to understand what needs to be done behind the scenes; we need the marketing team to stay focused with the on-page optimization. Issues like keyword research, placement of keywords, content and so forth.
What’s listed in the article and posted by the fans are a few items that fall under ‘site review’ but we’ll call it ‘Technical Review’.
The obvious items are mentioned, which I considered to be on-page optimization items such as H1 tags, page naming, hierarchy and so on.
Where are the real technical reviews? Like arrangements of Meta data, JavaScripts moved to an include file, site built using CSS when applicable, pages being validated through W3C, crawable navigations and so on? Let’s not forget the duplicate website issue we face, www vs non-www.
The most important technical issue I come across more often than not, content management systems. Do they stand up to the expectation of search engine friendliness? Most of them have come a long way but there are few out there that require modifications to do so.
Michael, one of the fans whom I agree with commented:
“I agree that the technical review needs to occur first. If technical issues exist that the client isn’t willing to address and/or pay to have corrected, you’ll be de-railed before you get a chance to do keyword research.
I’ve often seen a site’s search engine rank increase dramatically from correcting simple technical or archetecture issues, even though the site’s usage of content (keywords) wasn’t optimimal. Many times these technical issues are glaringly obvious and need to be addressed upfront.”
Build a better mousetrap…then you can worry about filling it with the right bait (keywords/content).”
Duncan went on to say,
“Site/information architecture issues fall into a number of camps: duplicate content, keyword cannibalisation, and a distinct lack of keyword targeting. All of which, in my opinion, are a bigger hurdle to ranking than most of the issues that are picked up in a technical site review.”
If the search engines can’t crawl through the website, that’s a much bigger hurdle that needs to be addressed than figuring out which keywords need to be placed in the H1 tag.
It really all comes down to how well it’s presented to the client in an understandable manner. All this information can be cumbersome when it’s compiled into one review and some can get lost in cyberspace with all the jargon.
Shall this debate be to determine exactly what is considered a ‘site review’ and what is considered a ‘technical review’?
I’d be interested to hear what your debate is.
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