Whether you designed your site in-house, had a friend / family member design it or paid to have a professional design company create your website, it's quite possible an injustice has happened. Independent of the look of your site, there are crucial search marketing steps that need to be taken to ensure a site shows up properly in search engines and directories. Common problems we see with sites include: Untitled Document, Missing Descriptions, Generic Descriptions, Not Listed Properly, Excessive Duplication, Poor Menu Structure, Site Unlisted, Missing Pages, Missing Images, Bad Links, Typos. And the consequences are typically: Don't / Barely Show Up Under Your Own Name, Under What You Do, Geographically and / or Spelled Correctly. Believe it or not, many people write off the Internet as "no real buyers," "nobody wants what I have," "my prices must be too expensive" and a plethora of other reasons why a site is not generating traffic. Would you open a store and immediately reduce your prices by 50% just because nobody has walked in your store in the first 5 minutes of business? If you would, then you would be making a big business mistake. eWareness has the experience to quickly and affordably help you with some of these common mistakes made by both beginners and expert site designers. Take this quick test: go to a search engine (Google, Yahoo & MSN for instance) and type in your company name. How does it show up (if at all)? Type in your site address (example: abcdefg.com). How does it show up? If you are unhappy, concerned, confused or surprised, please contact us. One of our staff members will gladly (and for free) explain the problems you are seeing with your site and offer solutions that will help your site get back on track.

The original site was likely missing the Title tag or the current site was missing them originally. Google indexed the page and voila... "untitled document". Not sure when the site was last updated, but Google, Yahoo, et al. can take some time for updated sites to show up in each search engine's respective results. In due time it will absolutely fix itself. The main issue is "how long will it take?" You can definitely force an update by setting up a sitemap and submitting it to Google Webmaster Tools, etc. The good thing is in time it will correct itself even if the Title was still "untitled document" because of some new triggers Google and Yahoo now have in place. We get 100s of calls and emails a week about this. Just about every time it's a timing thing. You can sit back and wait it out or take some measures to expedite the update (sitemap through Google) which will likely still take a few days before you see the updated listing.

First of all you've got to understand that these "SEO companies" that call you only know one thing: your website' URL. They did not do any research on you or your business. How do we know this? We've gotten 1,000s of calls over the years. Sometimes we'll speak to one of these "SEO (some have even pronounced it "SEE-O") Companies" and listen to their sales pitch. It usually starts with "we've gone through your site and see that it's not showing up in the search engines!" While we are on the phone with them the first thing we do is check our site's statistics. Our site has several hundred pages. It never fails... we mention "we do not see any visitor who came into our site and went to every page." Typically that will get them to hang up. Sometimes they are persistent and will continue on. So then the next question is "what keyword or keyphrase did you type in?" And of course we get an answer like "all the terms associated with your industry" which even the most naive website owner knows is not true. Next question: "which search engines did you use to search for said terms?" "Google, Yahoo and Bing." Ok... our goal here wasn't to bore you with what you already know but to let you know: "this is a sales tactic" this is simply put a "scare tactic." The so called "SEO companies" have little to no repeat customers which means they have little to no happy customers (aka little to no success).

Google let their secret out of the bag many years ago! Google states that the most important thing you can do is to create content for your site visitors. To take it one step further: create content that is informative and helps answer all the typical questions someone would have if they were thinking about walking into your brick and mortar store. Layout, design, etc. are all important. But content is really king.