Outsourcing is a buzz word at the moment in web development and search engine optimisation (SEO). With the plethora of companies available to outsource web work to in Asia, there is a temptation for many companies to do this. I have touched on it in my 2nd good web design post.

It may be no surprise that outsourcing can be risky, and it seems that a major player is taking these risks. We have seen 1st hand one of the risks involved in a job that we have had to quote for. The client had been promised an SEO friendly website by their web design company, who claim that all their sites come with basic SEO. Attached to this site is a content management system which uses some rather basic, and unorthodox methods. Certain aspects of the content management system (CMS) will write data to a database, and front end pages retrieve it. That is fine. The problem has arisen though, when some of the other web pages don't have their data saved in the database, but to static HTML pages instead. This then prevents the database being used as the source of meta data for the pages. To compound this problem, the site uses a Master Page to derive its design from, which in turn contains the page title, keywords and description. The end result is that each page of the site has exactly the same meta data which is pretty useless!

With the combination of these 2 issues, the solution will never be the tidiest or slickest as the client has already had to pay out for the website, and as a new business it is another cost they could really do without!

There is a simple moral to this story. When you buy your website with a content management system, ask if you can have unique meta tags for each page. They are building blocks of SEO and to have to add the functionality for this at a later date will cost more in the long run.