Can websites made with sitebuilder programs such as 1and1 website builder, 123-reg InstantSite, Mr Site, etc. still be optimised properly for the search engines and gain good rankings in google? Does anybody have any experience of these or know of any examples of good sites that have been made by then?
Knowing fully well of search engine optimization and placements, these firms do make sure they do not loose out the business for want of these features in their services. So, they much be having these value added features to attract the customers. Also do see past client's websites to see if they are doing any better or not.
Yes, of course. After all, the two key components of SEO are quality content and quality backlinks....a site builder can't affect either of those.
I tried Yahoo's sitebuilder software a while back. It was so horrible. You got tons of messy html, javascript, css codes. SEO works best when you have a search engine friendly site to start with. It is possible to optimize sites built with these easy-to-use builder software, but it is a lot more difficult. Another drawback of these builder software is that the sites created tend to load slower because all the extra "fat" they put in. So, I'd stay away from them.
I had the same question the first time I looked at the nasty coding of a Yahoo store for a customer, but managed to get the site on the first page of all 3 big search engines for our main keyphrase. We even went through the trouble of building another site - now we have 2 sites in the top 5 of Yahoo and Google, a #1 on MSN with the new site and the Yahoo store at #12 (this dropped like all of my other MSN sites recently).