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Rebuild Website or Perform SEO?
By Chris Genge (c) Nov. 05, 2004
(http://www.1stonthelist.ca) 


Rebuild Website or Perform SEO... which should you do first? 

A lot of website owners are interested in rebuilding their 
website and in performing search engine optimization (SEO), 
but can't. Budget constraints won't allow for both and so they 
struggle with which one to do first. Rebuilding a website is a 
great idea. Performing SEO on it is better. 

The Internet is vast...truly vast. It is comprised of, at last 
count, over 3 billion web pages and that number increases daily. 
People need a map to chart this unimaginably large landscape and 
search engines are the maps. SEO provides pointers to your 
business on the maps; rebuilding your website does not. 

If you understand the following statement, then the decision is 
very easy to make - in order to become visible to their second 
audience (the visitors), websites must first receive adequate 
top rankings (the first two pages of listing results) by their 
first audience (the search engines).  

Search Engine Optimization 
Search engine optimization is probably the single most important 
marketing technique that a website owner can do to increase 
visibility and visitors. Greater visibility and highly targeted 
visitors improve sales, which in turn, improves the bottom-line.  

Numerous studies have proven just how important SEO is for 
online businesses:  

· 50% of those who bought from online retail sites arrived via 
  the search engines. 

· Between 85 and 90% of people use search engines to find 
  websites they've never visited before. 

· The Financial Times reported August 2002, that every day over 
  340 million web users rely on search engines to locate new 
  businesses. 

. 57% of Internet users search the web each day, making search 
  the second most popular Internet activity next to checking 
  email (81%). 

Studies have also proven that SEO has the best return on 
investment (ROI) of any form of advertising in terms of 
cost-per-acquisition (CPA). Savvy website owners who realize 
just how fierce competition on the Internet is use SEO to 
position their business ahead of their competitors. If you are 
not incorporating SEO as part of a website marketing/promotion 
strategy you are losing out, because your competition mostly 
likely is!  

If done properly, the results from SEO are very impressive. 
One of our long time clients in the printing industry has been 
operating the same site for almost five years. Instead of 
rebuilding their website which has a very simple design, they 
decided to perform SEO. That same site now delivers so much 
business that SEO is the only form of sales and marketing they 
use (both online and offline). Another client now does as much 
business in one day as it used to in seven. And this client 
originally wanted to rebuild their site first. And to this day, 
the site is still the same except for some minor regular updates. 
In the past, the client did a lot of print advertising, but 
because of great SEO results, they have cut their advertising 
costs in half and achieved sales growth of 700%! For more great 
examples, read the case studies on the Search Engine Marketing 
Professional Organization (SEMPO - http://www.sempo.org/) 
website. 

Rebuilding a Website
Rebuilding a site makes it look nice, provides fresh content, 
and sometimes improves navigation. Will any of these lead to 
increased visitors? Most likely not. Making aesthetic changes 
does very little to increase a website's visibility on the 
Internet. 
 
It is estimated that 56% of ALL websites are "lost in 
cyberspace"! What is the point of spending money on rebuilding 
a site if no one ever sees it? It would be a complete waste of 
time, money, and effort - all of which translate into a very 
poor ROI. 

Your website is competing with over 3 billion (at last count) 
other pages on the Internet. It will be "lost" by not having it
visible to the search engines - akin to putting up a flashing 
billboard on a deserted island! It can be the greatest billboard 
ever designed, but because of its isolated location very few 
people will see or read it, and thus, it will be a poor source 
of revenue generation.  

The fact is, there are lots of great websites on the Internet. 
So what? What's the use of having a great website if no one 
knows about it or can find it? And even if people do know about 
it, you are still not reaching the largest Internet demographic: 
the 85 to 90% of ALL Internet users who find what they are 
looking for by conducting searches on search engines! 

The top-4 search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. How do 
they compare in terms of traffic? The info below shows the top 5 
results of the Top-50 Internet Property Rankings for October 2003 
(ComScore Media Metrix, Nov. 2003). Keep in mind that the table 
shows total number of unique visitors, not total number of 
searches. So while MSN is tops in terms of traffic, Google is 
still the king of search. 

Rank     Property                Unique Visitors (in thousands)
1        MSN-Microsoft sites            109,334
2        Yahoo! sites                   108,673
3        AOL Time Warner Network        108,394
4        eBay                            62,454
5        Google sites                    58,209

The point of the table is that four out of the top five 
most-visited sites are search related sites. SEO is your 
mechanism for becoming visible to this group. SEO is critical 
to the success of your online venture. Rebuilding is also 
important, but it can wait.

Other Considerations

·Ask yourself, what will deliver more results to my business: 
 rebuilding or SEO? 

· What is the purpose of your site? If you use it to bring in 
 customers or sell products, then SEO is definitely the one to 
 do first. If visitors and sales aren't important, but having 
 a beautiful, stylish site is, then by all means rebuild it.
 
· To deliver maximum benefits your website has to be both people
 and search engine friendly. Will rebuilding accomplish this? 

· Some owners think they'll rebuild the site first and then
  perform SEO, only to discover afterwards that their budgets 
  won't allow for it. Ask yourself, do I want to be stuck with 
  a nice looking site that delivers NO more traffic than its 
  predecessor? 

· Your website should be an asset, not an expense. It should be 
  generating you income or leads, or providing useful information 
  about your company. If it isn't, then why have it? 

· In the US, 13% of traffic to a website comes from search 
  engines, up from 8% for the previous year. International 
  figures were even more striking with some countries having 
  search engine referral rates as high as 21%! SEO makes your 
  site search engine friendly. Rebuilding it may or may not, 
  depending on how skilled in SEO your webmaster is. There's 
  far, far more to SEO than just inserting META tags (title, 
  description, keyword tag).  

SEO First, Rebuild Second 
It really is a much wiser choice to perform SEO first. Later, if 
the results indicate the need to make improvements, then proceed 
with rebuilding your website. Involve your SEO in the rebuilding 
process - their input/ advice will be invaluable!

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Chris Genge is the President of 1st on the List Promotion Inc, a 
website promotion firm that specializes in pay-per-click management 
and search engine optimization. Chris writes on current and emerging 
search engine marketing theories and has been involved in the SEO 
industry since its very early days. Since 1997, he has focused on 
researching and implementing the most effective search engine 
optimization techniques. Learn more at http://www.1stonthelist.ca/ 
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