When deciding on the development platform for your website, people responsible for design projects of large scale / high-volume websites must take into account, in addition to graphic design concepts, functionality and ease of editing, that the final product must be positioned on search engines.
A good website is a very visited website. The large-scale websites to which people tend to mistakenly call portals (see definition at end of article), have the enormous advantage that the extensive information they contain can make the website, and the companies that have built them, online leaders. I say they "can" make them online leaders, because it is not always so and I'll explain why.
In the event that your company intends to publish a high-volume content website, either because your company offers a wide range of products and services, markets various brands of products, is dedicated to the sale of assets like houses and automobiles, integrates a wide range of tourist services, sells an extensive line of promotional items, or on the nature of its business, has a comprehensive library of technical literature and articles on various topics, you will be able to capture the attention of many visitors and potential customers who are interested in precisely those products, services or information that your company has.
Search Engine Positioning is the Key
If for a conventional website, which only promotes products and services, being found through a search engines is important, for large websites that were created thinking in reaching a larger audience, search engine positioning is not only important but vital. This means that if you have been appointed as the responsible for the project of developing a website of this magnitude, it is extremely important that you take time to establish a promotion system that allows this information to actually reach potential customers hands, say, the eyes of your target market, and not end up like many other large websites, like a white elephant whose participation is minimal in the efforts to achieve the overall business objectives set by your company.
Successful large websites can be easily identified and also many of them we used them daily. Just do a few searches on topics like medicine, engineering, software, hardware, finance, administration, literature, art, film and theater, among hundreds of other topics and you quickly find these great websites with lots of content. If you have an extensive website, say 500 or more pages, and it's not part of this elite group of websites that hold significant traffic of visitors, you probably did not made the right decision in selecting the web design agency and development platform of the website.
When deciding on the development platform, typically the responsible for designing projects of large / high-volume websites, both agencies and their clients, take into account only criteria such as graphic design, functionality and ease of editing and maintenance of the web pages, forgetting factors of equal or greater importance such as the positioning of the website in search engines.
The root of the problem
In the last three years, companies and organizations dedicated to making content management software called CMS (content management system), indispensable for the development of large websites, corporate portals and government portals, have been committing more to get into the market with standards-compliant solutions required by search engines. However, we must take into account that many of these solutions are offered with a licensing system for free use, highly sought after by companies because it is free software, so that new versions aren't released at the time nor with the total of facilities that the market is demanding. Currently, there are more CMS applications that do not support search engine positioning than they do. I do not have the exact figures on the market, but basically, in a group of a hundred of CMS products, only ten of them are compatible with search engine positioning and, to be more specific, some of them only partially supported.
We can't forget the group of "custom-made" CMS applications which are being developed within companies. It is not a negligible figure, since many companies have chosen to produce their own CMS, partly because if you have some experience in development of dynamic websites is not as complex to develop an application of this type. Unfortunately, these designers also have forgotten the need for promotion and websites created by this immense group of CMS applications cannot also be positioned in the search engines properly.
How to Get Good Results
The key is to take into account the promotion of the website from the outset and properly select a development platform that facilitates the work of promoting the site, primarily through search engine positioning. By doing so, you will be sure to put in motion the machinery to promote the website almost from the moment of its creation. As mentioned above, and I will not get tired of repeating it over and over again, the mistake is that companies first design the website and months later try to implement a system of online promotion when it is no longer feasible, at least not through search engine positioning. This, in a large website is a direct path to failure.
Decisions on a project to develop a large-scale website should be taken with great care. You are required to investigate this issue and consult the online marketing specialists about possible alternatives for their specific project, carefully analyzing the pros and cons of each option. There are excellent products on the market: robust systems for large enterprises, mid-range applications for large and small businesses, low-cost software for small and micro-enterprises, and even free licensing applications. You should investigate possible options and select the best alternative for your company, ideally after having analyzed the cost-effectiveness of some of them. Come to the experts in search engine positioning and examine what alternatives are offered for your business. In a project of developing a large website, you simply can not go for it with just 'any' application.
Definitions
An online portal is a website that acts as a starting point for navigating the Web. That is, the portal is not exactly the final destination and is used only as a bridge to other sites that actually contain the information we are searching for. Portals typically include large search engines and website directories. Some popular portals are Yahoo, Google, Lycos, Altavista, MSN and AOL. There are also many specific sites, known as "niche portals" for certain industries in particular. Examples of the latter group include Cnet (for computers and technology), Fool.com (for investors, and Garden.com (for gardening).
Most of these big portals have millions of web pages listed so that visitors can easily locate them. They also have extensive website directories, which are organized by topic. Although the primary mission of a portal is to locate other sites for you, many of them already include enough information within the portal so that in such cases is not necessary to go to another website.
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About the Blog Author: Timpa has the mission of providing all entrepreneurs, whether experiencied or not in online business strategies, with the right information to help them manage their businesses online in the best, most time-effective and cost-effective, smarter way.
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