Why Search Engines rule our lives Meta Tags and your Website

Awarded at Toronto "Ultra Advanced SEO Symposium" Nov. 2005.

Why Search Engines rule our lives - Meta Tags and your Website

You do not need to know any HTML to build web pages and a website!

YOU know your product or service backwards. Chances are YOU had to supply your designer with the content for the site in the first place...

And if you want something changed, YOU have to supply the changes to the designer, who will eventually get around to it, make the changes, upload the file and send YOU the bill...

The Internet doesn't work like this. It cannot work well for you under these conditions. YOU have to have control of your website. Direct Control at that. As you will come to see you will need many pages to cover the many different WORDS used to describe your business or product. You CANNOT achieve web success by using a mere 10 pages or so. You need significantly more content than that and having a third party involved in the process slows you down and adds to your costs substantially.

I am NOT saying web designers are useless. Far from it. You do need a reasonable 'look and feel' to your website and your designer should work on producing you a template that gives you a good look and feel with a well structured navigation that makes the VISITORS experience of you a great one.

Remember that it is ALL about the VISITOR now.

Front Page allows you fingertip control of your website. It is a simple and easy to use product that designers hate because it makes web design so easy. Yes, it has a few small quirks that take about 10 seconds to master, BUT the chances of you encountering them are remote to none.

You don't even need to understand HTML. What you need to pick up you will gradually learn as you go along but even then if you are like us five years down the line you STILL won't know any HTML at all...

Front Page allows you complete control over your web destiny. You can quickly and easily change your Meta Tags manually yourself and you can upload your website yourself as well. Incidentally, if you are paying more than R35 a month for your website you are paying too much!

One of our favourite hosts cost us US$ 5 per month for 500 Mb disk space, 7 Gb of traffic per month (when they bother to check), UNLIMITED mail boxes, FREE statistics (and GOOD, comprehensive statistics at that), anti virus, PHP scripting, databases galore, blah blah you name it. If you want more disk space for the princely sum of US$ 10 per month you can have 1500 Mb of space and 21 Gb of traffic and if you need more, just ask. It's cheap!

We are being ripped off something stupid in South Africa for basic website hosting. And don't worry about support - it is web based, it is free and I have had, consistently, every single one of my queries answered faster than waiting on the phone line for support from a local company. Also being off shore has concerns about speed - it is total nonsense. Our .co.za sites actually run faster on our offshore hosts than on our local hosts... strange but true!

The bottom line is this: Take control of YOUR website. It is easier than you think and with the correct approach you can make your website do what YOU originally intended it to do for you: Expose your products or services to customers that are looking for YOU!