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What not to do when buying a domain name and hosting a website.

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May 29th, 2007 by Jay Westerdal

Green Lake MassageI was checking Green Lake Massage’s website. They are a small Seattle based company. Great domain name for a firm that gives messages to name itself after the city it is in and the thing it does. [City] [Occupation]. However when looking at there website and their whois record I am shocked at how disorganized everything is. First off their SEO Score was only 52%. They are using only images on the site except for the footer and the title tag! This means that all the copy on the site is invisible to search engines and for people searching for those keywords.

All the graphic links on the page load a javascript image with even more words hidden inside of graphics. This violates so many rules about how to SEO a site. It is a good example site because it breaks so many rules. Surprisingly it ranks #1 in Google for its own name, I would have thought it would be out ranked by a competitor.

This is what the website looks like to GoogleBot:
Greenlake Massage

When I check the whois of the domain name. Green Lake Massage.com I see that the Registrant is “Just Us, Inc.” and not the clinic itself. Bad news for them, they don’t even own their own domain name. Yikes! If a company is not listed as the Registrant, sorry they are out of luck.

My top hints for this site:

  1. Don’t put paragraphs of text inside images.
  2. Fire your Webmaster.
  3. Transfer their domain into their own name.
  4. Make multiple pages and don’t use javascript.
  5. Add more content and describe what your company does.

Small business owners tend to focus on the details of their business inside their shops, but don’t realize their online presents is a bigger part of their success or lack there of. Customers look up phone numbers, maps, and information about companies online. Most people I know prefer to learn the information about a company on their website rather then playing 20 questions on the phone with the secretary.

Registrant:
Just Us, Inc.
6823 Oswego Place, NE
Seattle, WA 98115
US

Domain Name: GREENLAKEMASSAGE.COMGREENLAKEMASSAGE.COM

Administrative Contact:
Watson, Dorothy
Green Lake Massage
6823 Oswego Pl NE Suite 1
Seattle, WA 98115
US
206-527-9709

Technical Contact:
Qwest Internet Solutions
600 Stinson Blvd.
Minneapolis, MN 55413
US
800-672-8520 fax: 123 123 1234

Record expires on 25-Mar-2008.
Record created on 25-Mar-1999.

Domain servers in listed order:

AUTHNS1.MPLS.QWEST.NET 63.231.205.1
AUTHNS3.STTL.QWEST.NET 206.81.192.11

Posted in SEO, SEO Score | 3 Comments »