Digital Ready Business Kit
First of all I just want to apologise in advance to anyone involved in the digitalready.org.au site or the organisation behind ACCAN (Australian Communications Consumer Action Network). Their site was pointed out to me by know trouble maker and journalist, Paul Wallbank. He posted the link on Facebook last night after I had already recorded this week’s show. I’m not going to delve to much into the merits of a taxpayer funded site delivering a “Digital Ready Business Kit”. I will leave that to the likes of the aforementioned scribe. I will however record another show today as I can’t stop thinking about some lessons we can learn from the seemingly total abandonment of any SEO principles.
I’m sure the people behind the site are lovely and there is always a back story of which I know nothing about and the site may have built this way for a reason. I just can’t think of good one.
Best CMS For SEO
If you are just doing content and you don’t need a big ecommerce engine then I would always recommend WordPress. If someone asked if they should build in Joomla my advice would be only if they didn’t care about ranking. It would seem Digital Ready would be in that category. I am very familar with Joomla and up until 2009 it was my CMS of choice. As the image below demonstrates though, the world jumped off it and onto WordPress at about the same time.
I’m not saying you can’t get ranked with a Joomla site but it a heck of lot harder than WordPress.
Do HTTPS or HTTP
Don’t do both like this site is doing. Right now you have the site visible at an http and an https version. In our experience this is a big quality issue with Google. If your launching anew site just do HTTPS.
Don’t Launch With Errors
20% of the pages are either 404s or 500 errors. This is another quality issue.
Don’t Duplicate Your Home Page
The home page is duplicated, another quality issue. It is available at / as well as index.php and /?view=featured which is actually a link on the page.
Don’t Replicate Your Site At WWW
The whole site is replicated at www.digitalready.org.au To Google we now have four versions of the same site. The HTTP & HTTPS plus the WWW versions of those.
Don’t Copy, Create Original Content
Selecting a random selection of content shows that it has been repurposed on a number of other related sites. Once again a quality issue as the site is just republishing another site’s work. Why should Google rank it when it can show the site which originated the content? From the checks I have done most of the content is lifted from the parent site Accan.org.au
There is so much more I could go on with like page titles, H1s etc but you get the picture.
Be Digital Ready, Be SEO Ready
Getting these things right not only helps your users it helps you rank 🙂 The fact that taxpayers money was wasted on this is one of the reasons that I have total disdain for ALL politicians.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
