The reason for this decline is a recent emphasis by the major search engines to not only serve up the most relevant search results, but the most recent as well.  And if  your site isn’t updated with current, relevant information then you’re losing the game to a site that is.

The sad part is that this is something that could be fixed with very little effort and very little expense.

There are a number of excellent, open-source (free!) content management systems available to the small business owner.  If you have some technical skills you can make the switch yourself.  Otherwise, you’ll need to hire someone to help migrate your site to a new platform and teach you how to add new content quickly and easily.

Costs for this can range from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars depending on how many pages you currently have on your site, what functionality you want and whether or not you use a template or have a new design created for you.

Here are a few of the top open-source content management systems available today.

• WordPress (my favorite)
• Joomla
• Drupal
• Dot Net Nuke
• Expression Engine

I’m sure there are lots of others that are very good but these are the ones we have had experience with.

And if you need some help converting your site give me a call.  I’ll be glad to take a look at it and give you a quote.

Photo Credit: Dinosaur Jr. by desdeaquinet on Flikr

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This is the second in a series of five articles on Search Engine Optimization – Back to the Basics.

One of the strongest factors of a website that ranks well is the code itself.  This is something that most small business owners never even consider.  If a site looks good, as far as they are concerned, it’s a good site.

However, the coding plays a big part in how well your website ranks in the search engines.  If your site has a lot of unnecessary code to compensate for lack of technical ability on the part of your web designer, that can cause a problem.

I see this alot with small companies who sign up for cheap web sites because they can build it themselves.  The companies offering such sites have done so many things to make the sites dummy proof that there is an extremely high amount of unnecessary code.  This is true for scripts as well.  Scripts are small (sometimes not so small) pieces of code that make a site function a certain way.

Every bit of code and every script that is required to make your site function properly can potentially slow down the amount of time it takes for your site to load.  Site load time has always been a factor in rankings, but just recently Google made an announcement that page load times are going to be a bigger factor in rankings and have even provided some tools in Webmaster Tools so that site owners can measure their page load times and take steps to improve it.  Keep in mind that if your site is built on one of the do-it-yourself platforms mentioned above that you will have little to no control over these factors.

Our own site is built on the WordPress platform, which, in my opinion, is a very well coded system.  It is an open-source platform so there are literally thousands of programmers around the world working on it every day to make it better.  Every site we have built on the WordPress platform performs significantly better in search results, even than the sites we had previously optimized on other platforms.

It just takes a few seconds to look at a site and tell if there are issues with bloated code.  Give me a call or send me an email and I’ll be glad to take a quick look at your site.

If you would like to know all the other factors affecting your rankings, you may want to consider our Comprehensive Website Marketing Analysis.

Tomorrow we’re going to talk about your on-page content as a ranking factor.

To your success!
Ken Partain

Related Posts:

• Search Engine Optimization – On-page Content
• Google Rolls Out Social Search
• Small Business SEO Just Got More Affordable
• Search Engine Optimization – URL Structure
• Search Engine Optimization – Traffic

All of the sites we create are built on the WordPress blogging platform and are very search engine friendly right out of the box.  We will install a complete set of our recommended plugins and show you exactly how to use it to maximize your web presence. We’ll also set it up so that it integrates seamlessly with your social media profiles on Twitter and Facebook.

WordPress is so easy to use.  If you can send an email or write a letter on your computer you already know how to use it.

The price is going up on January 1st, so if you have been thinking about a new website, don’t waste another minute.

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