I have a client / friend who I built a site for over 12 years ago (yeah you know when dinosaurs roamed the earth) and she has always loved it. She also had incredible Google rankings for years due to her hard work back linking etc etc.
Fast forward to today, she literally can’t be found in Google without digging back through the pages. She asked me my thoughts and honestly I told her I had just about given up doing any kind of SEO with the exception of just building sites properly. (I do some SEO on my own sites but don’t offer it as a client service anymore because honestly it’s maddening)
Anyway, she got back to me and specifically mentioned a mobile version of her site, which honestly is next to impossible due to the graphic design of the site. So the discussion then went to either overhauling her site or just building a mobile version. She asked which one I thought would help and I honestly had to tell her I did not know.
So I thought I would ask here, to people more in tuned with this type stuff these days.
Which (and all opinions welcome) would work to help her reclaim some of her search positions?
Oh and yeah, if anyone wants to peek at the old clunker of a site to see why there’s no way to make it mobile here’s a link to it: http://permanentcosmeticsbytheresa.com/
Do it in stages. The look is definitely dated (you can tell you did it twelve years ago) but underlying structure to the site isn’t that far off current practices. Some semantic changes (removing the inline styles - bad developer even 12 years ago! ), but for the most part the structure should work.
So start with removing the basic crud, then use a media query to work on smaller devices. It’ll be easier than you think.
Edit:
OK, the before and after page would need a major overhaul
@dc_dalton good to see you here and that you remember us. That was some quailty code (for that period in history :D)
The site looks dated but the design is good. Still, I’d personally take advantage of the opportunity and re-do it all.
The code itself is not bad (except for all that javascript in all those A elements because nowadays there are better ways to target elements) but even so, she could risk it a little bit more and maybe she would look the new design better.
The design also needs to be mobile friendly as Google likes that more but getting back to rankings will also take some commitment from here: She needs to add interesting content regularly (a blog comes handy for this) so the traffic she drives will come back. She needs to create backlinks (having her FB page and Twitter and pinterest and use it properly and regularly) to get some traffic.
In relation to social media, she doesn’t need to be everywhere but definitively she needs to be where her customers and potential customers are.
She needs to use more proefessional picutres, in my humble point of view.
I don’t think that the job of redoing the site is that bad… Probably for her, being active as a blogger or as a social media active user will be harder.
Although she could always use pay-per-click and get other people to write for her, either for free or paying some cash
Thanks all. as to the code if I remember correctly I redid the code in about 2005-2006 or so when I stopped working in Java and converted her site to PHP, hence the not so horrible code.
As far as her doing things like blogging etc well I know that isn’t going to work with her. She may have to hire someone to handle that.
Going to throw her some options and see what she thinks.
), but for the most part the structure should work.