Thursday 6 November 2008

80% of websites are broken

Earlier this year we studied the sites of our clients - about 784 of them. About 80% lacked elements that SEO experts say are crucial for Google to rank pages correctly. These errors had been there since day one, hurting traffic.

We've just completed a similar study on 310,000 sites to see how many of them have these issues. We wanted to know how many are missing Page Titles and/or Page Descriptions and/or have enough text to be useful. (Just the marketing aspect.) We ignored anything to do with the website's ability to convert lookers into buyers. If these were brick and mortar businesses it would be like driving past and looking at the signs and window displays.

The results are sobering. A third have broken page titles, about half have no page description at all, and a sixth had no text!

The full report is 6 pages long, in simple English designed for our small business community. The full report of site marketing defects is here: Website Marketing Defects Survey

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