I have a client that potentially wants to hire me for traffic building and SEO work. He is a retired dentist and has hired a web development company to build him a classified ads website (http://www.postandcore.com/). He is looking to generate a lot of traffic from SEO, and after taking a look through his website, I told him that it was very bad from the start. I would expect that each classified ad would be optimized so that the category, ad group, and key ad text would be in the Title and in the URL at the very least. Unfortunately I had found that none of this is true. I found out that the website built by by the company is based on ASP, lacks flexibility to do really anything in the back-end, took approximately 4 years to develop, and cost a whopping $15,000! I told my client that he had been taken for a ride, and that even an off the shelf CMS like Wordpress, with Classified's Theme would be far superior, dynamic, and outrank anything he could do with his current website, and cost next to nothing! I suggested he would be better off starting again on a Wordpress based CMS. He had relayed this information to the development company, visibly upset, and told the dentist that I am not qualified and uncapable to help the dentist. They further suggested that they can continue to use their SEO team to meet the dentist's website needs. What do you guys think? Emerson.
Thats's scary - I'm no webdev expert, but I could put something better than that up on a free cms base - I'd choose drupal personally, - and expect to get it up in 4 weeks, not 4 years.
1. Agreed that it's bad SEO-wise. 2. Can't comment about the cost, most people can look at facebook and say that they can make a similar site with Drupal or PHPFox or other CMS with community / social features. But can they handle the scale? 3. 4 years - that's definitely a lot of time, they probably didn't have enough expertise or their developers kept going off (or the requirements kept changing).
Geez, Wordpress or phpld and about 3 hours to do that tops. At least at that level. 5-6 hours it would have actually looked really good as well. Phpld is 25 dollars and does all of that out of the box. I don't see too many glaring issues SEO wise but it is missing a few standard things. It also has rookie development probs like canonical issues or having both the www and non www version of the site. If it further does not afford the ability to add page specific meta data they are clearly hacks. I have seen worse markup or output but it still has problems. They are clearly the ones not capable of doing the right thing based on your comments. Nigel
The programmer does have a lot of SEO issues that could have been easily addressed in his code. 1) the Meta title in the html head seems to be static always "www.postandcore.com" instead of changing to reflect the things that would be sold on that page 2)There are no meta descriptions in the category pages. once again these should reflect what would be sold on the page. 3)The page URLs use the Database id numbers instead of being useful. ie ?city=46&state=255. the city should be atlanta and the state Georgia not a number. 4)the home tab links to .com/classifieds/index.asp and then redirects to .com/classifieds/browse.asp.. WHY? $15,000 is not out of the question for a custom coded website, however to be worth while that must mean that there are specifications that could not be met by modifying "Off the Shelf" already written code. One of the desired specifications to be met does to seem to be SEO. It's difficult to see this ever doing well in the search engine SERPs
Not an unfair statement but in this case its about 13,500 dollars too much. Its a link directory. Nigel
By the category names, I'm guessing it's a little more than that. More like a classifieds site where you sign up to get an account, an then you can post ads. If I'm right.... then that would mean a user admin panel and also an administrative admin panel. I would assume there would be spam control to keep people from abusing the system and so on. $15,000 still seems a bit steep I would think closer to $3000 to $5000 for custom coded. But once again there could be more to the specifications then meet the eye. If the project started 4 years ago, then there were not near as many "Off the Shelf" products available. So the only option may have been custom code at the beginning. Now, I wouldn't even consider offering custom code for something like this unless the client wanted something special. It's pretty tough to judge something like this with out hearing the programmers side of the story.