I haven’t liked GoDaddy from the start; Yeah, yeah, yeah, I saw the Super Bowl commercial with the hot chicks, and maybe if they sold hot chicks, I’d like them. But they don’t, they sell domain names, web hosting and web services. As a web design and development firm, Sleepless Media often encounters clients who have registered their domain name or actually host their website with GoDaddy. Why do they use GoDaddy? I don’t think they really know, it’s a situation where all the lemmings are following each other off a cliff. I’ve heard excuses like “I have other domains there, so I just keep registering them there,” and “They’re cheap!” and “I want to have all of my services at one company,” and “I want my stuff at a big company that isn’t going to go away tomorrow.” I just don’t get what the appeal is. Do they like the ads? The busy-as-all-hell home page? The confusing control panel interface? The millions of “deals” they try to sell you while you’re checking out? I just don’t get it, I really don’t. Go Daddy sucks, just admit it.

First, let’s discuss the reason I’m writing this anti-godaddy rant. I’ve been trying to login via FTP into one of our client’s hosting accounts with GoDaddy for the past month. He’s sent me multiple pieces of login information, and it just never works. Finally he gives me his login information to log directly into godaddy. Bingo! (At least I thought). After attempting to find the domain name, I was finally directed to another control panel at a new page where the ftp information was nowhere to be found. I finally had to call up the kooks at godaddy to get to the bottom of it. They walked me through updating the password - and it takes up to 30 MINUTES to update a password before I can try to ftp again. Since when does anything take 30 minutes?! It just doesn’t, and godaddy needs to step it up. We’ve wasted hours trying to login to the ftp, it shouldn’t be this hard.

Anyhow, that was just the spark, here’s the full explanation….

Exhibit A: Let’s start with the home page:

How do you like it? Pretty right? Links on top of links, ads on top of ads, junk on top of junk. Just plain hideous. At least with their reputation, they could have chosen a hotter chick!

Exhibit B: Let’s try to buy something off this pile:

While doing this, I noticed something pretty amazing…. I was trying to register GODADDYISAPILE.COM and and was shown this message:

A quick search at Namecheap.com (My registrar of choice) shows that godaddyisapile.com is actually available:

I tested this with other domain names that have “godaddy” in the name, and they all display this message. I guess it’s good thinking on GoDaddy’s part - because I’m sure a lot of people try to, and have in the past, registered domain names with their name in it with negative connotations. In fact, go to go-daddy-sucks.com or godaddysucks.com - they actually redirect to godaddy.com! Yay!

So let’s go with something else:

YES! Just what I wanted: thisregistrarisapile.com! Wait a second, what’s all that other stuff below? Yep: A bunch of crap you don’t want or need, and lots of stuff on “SALE!” Great, I’m so pumped I can’t believe my eyes. Let’s checkout, yay!

Wait a second… I thought I was checking out? What’s this? A chance to to buy a bunch of other junk I don’t need? Some tips on why I should buy more from their sales team? No thanks, I’ll click the tiny “continue to checkout” link…

Exhibit C: Creating an account: Wow, we’re really getting somewhere!

This is probably the simplest page I’ve been to yet, wow, maybe they’re coming around and letting me finish what I came here for!

Exhibit D: I need hosting now too? Wow.

Yep, just when I thought I was getting somewhere, they shoot me to their hosting sales page:

Wow! A bunch of cheap plans with a bunch of features and terms the normal person doesn’t understand. Fantastic…. I’ll skip it though. WAIT! I can’t skip it! No proceed to checkout, no next step. My only option is “Add to Cart.” I guess I’ll have to add a hosting plan. I’ll choose a “Windows” plan - that sounds good right? (You probably should have chosen “Linux” - it’s more common and is better for php/mysql…)

Exhibit E: Finally I get to check out.

Oops, wrong again! Now they’re trying to force-feed me a bunch more domains that they claim will really help me out. I don’t know about you, but this annoys me to no end. No thanks. I’ll “continue to checkout”(They actually gave me an option this time, whoopty whoo!)

Exhibit F: THE CHECKOUT PAGE!

Look at that, a real checkout page! And it looks pretty straightforward and easy. What gives! Maybe GoDaddy isn’t so bad after all. Maybe it’s just their logo that’s a pile!

Exhibit G: WRONG AGAIN!

Yep, they “checkout” page was a false alarm. It allows you to either login or create an account, but then sends you to another page full of wonderful offers! All worthless in my opinion. Oh, and notice how the domain registration length defaults to “2 year” - in GoDaddy’s defense, it’s always a good idea to register a domain for more than 1 year, but still, they want that extra money, and they’re hoping you don’t notice.

Exhibit H: Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse…

As I was preparing to move to the next step and see if I could complete this order once again, I was taken off guard by this message:

Process Expired? Huh? Well, I guess I took too long in between steps to put this blog together, but just when I thought there couldn’t possibly be any additional steps….

Exhibit I: Trying to proceed from when my session expired.

After minutes of loading, it brought me to a checkout page, one I’ve never seen before:

But wait! All I’ve got in my cart is the hosting?! Yep, it ditched out the domain name I was trying to buy. I didn’t even want to buy their hosting in the first place! I could probably post 20 more steps of the frustrating process that they’ve spent years spamming out, but I think I’ll stop here in letting you know why We don’t Like GoDaddy. At All.

So you want to be #1 on Google huh? We know. Trust us: WE KNOW. So does your mom, and your sister, and that kid you went to high school with that smelled kinda funny. And hey, we want to be #1 too - and we are depending on what phrase or keywords you are typing in, and what day, and which way the wind happens to be blowing.

The short answer is: there is no guaranteed way to get high rankings in the Google search engine results. No magic keywords, no secret meta tags buried in your site’s code, no dollar amount. Heck, not even Google knows - they don’t control if you’re number one - your website, your visitors and your marketing efforts do.

Is Sleepless Media a “Search Engine Optimization Company” (”SEO Company”)? - No, we aren’t - because we don’t believe in charging someone for something that is impossible to guarantee. We do however, pride ourselves on building well-coded, solid, search engine friendly websites that are optimized for high search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Whether it’s a one page brochure site, or a multi-language corporate e-commerce site, we aim for the best search engine results possible.

Here are some helpful tips and recommendations (in no particular order) for making sure your website is optimized for search engines, without having to pay an SEO company a $6000.00 “website audit fee” and $1,000.00 per month for pretty much nothing:

#1) Hire a good graphic/web designer AND a good web developer.
In Sleepless Media’s case, we have a staff of professionals that specialize in both the front-end user interface (UI) design and the coding. But that isn’t always the case, sometimes they aren’t the same person or company at all. For instance, a website design created by a graphic designer may be laid out terribly for search engines, just as a programmer that knows how to do database coding may not do a good job optimizing their code for search engines. On top of that, a marketing company or advertising agency that knows nothing about websites, and outsources both your design & development could literally kill your online presence in some cases.

#2) Know what keywords and search phrases you should be targeting.
Pick your battles. Let’s say you sell books on your website - if you want to come up #1 when you type “Books” into Google: GIVE UP NOW. If you want to come up #1 when you type in something like “Rare and Specialty Bookseller in San Francisco California” or “Books on SEO” - then you may have a chance. Sleepless Media helps our clients determine what they should be targeting.

#3) Your content is extremely important.
Write good, clear and concise content about your products and services using different keywords and phrases that make sense for you or your business. The more keyword-rich content the better, and the more you vary your usage of your keywords and phrases, the better. Don’t think that just because you use the word “Book” in your content a million times means Google is going to care. The more useful information you have, the more your users are going to care, and that all adds up to good search engine results and rankings. Hey - why do you think I’m taking the time to write this article?

#4) The “Keyword” Meta Tag
People seem to think that the “keyword” meta tags are pretty important - and they are, uh, well they used to be, wait - I think they are? Truth is, Google totally disregards the “Keyword” meta tag due to website owners and developer bloating and spamming it what way too many words and phrases. Yahoo! and MSN seem to still look at this tag though - so even though we don’t like or recommend using either of those search engines, people in fact do still use them. So, because of that, we do recommend having a keyword meta tag on each page, and a DIFFERENT keyword meta tag for EACH PAGE. Don’t put anymore than up to 25 keywords or phrases, separate them by commas and you’re good.

#5) The “Description” Meta Tag
This tag is important and still used by Google in many cases. It is often the blurb that comes up under your search engine result link. Choose a short and sweet, 1-2 sentence description of your site or business for your home page. For the other pages, change it up to reflect what kind of information is on that page.

#6) The “Title” Meta Tag
Why not really a meta tag at all, the “Title” tag is a very important part of SEO. I’d say it’s a good idea to have 3-12 words (keyword rich of course) describing what the page is and telling users (and search engine crawlers) where they are on your website. The more it relates to the content on the page - the better.

#5) Page URLs and Naming Conventions
The naming conventions of URLs on the pages of your website are an often overlooked way to make sure your pages are found by search engines in a way that is relative to their content. Instead of a 1 word file name or url ending like “about.php” - why not call it “about-specialty-book-seller-san-francisco.php” ? Seems a little lame I know, but from our experience, it seems to help in search engine result rankings. This is even more important on products in an e-commerce store. If the url is plain and doesn’t say anything about the product (i.e. “category.php?id=1″) then it isn’t telling the search engine crawler anything. If instead, it says something like “category-name-here?product-id=detailed-product-name-here” then you’re better off. A string of useless, arbitrary numbers isn’t going to do you a bit of good. Also, dashes between words are better than words with no spaces, and even underscores.

#6) Incoming Relative Links
This is probably one of the most important things you can have that will help your ranking in search engines. I’m not suggesting you do what a SEO company does, and add your site to a bunch of useless link farms, but the more links you have to your site throughout the pages on the internet, the better. Why? Because it means more people are finding your site, which increases your traffic, and more importantly, more people find your site valuable enough to link to it. With a little bit of a proactive effort, and a little grass roots internet marketing, we can show you how to increase the number of incoming links to your website.

#7) Traffic, in General
The more traffic, the more relative your website is to Google. If you just sit there waiting for things to happen, chances are, nothing will. An internet business or website is only as good as the marketing efforts and work you put behind it. If you aren’t sending people there, or promoting it in some way, your rankings just won’t get much better. Pay-per-click advertising like Google Adwords can be a good way to jump start this, e-newsletters are another.

#8) Keep your Content Fresh.
If you never change your site’s content, your users may not have a good reason to return, and to put it bluntly, search engines won’t care about you. Update your site on a regular basis to keep it fresh, and to increase your site’s content, and you’ll be better off. Make sure you have a webmaster that can keep it updated for you on a regular basis, or better yet, get Sleepless CMS set up so you can add and edit content on your site all day and night if you want. Content Management Systems are a must, in my opinion, for good search engine optimization.

#9) Be Smart: Don’t Spam or try to Trick the Search Engines
If you’re an idiot about bloating your site, your keywords and trying underhanded tricks like creating hundreds of useless pages, making real small, unreadable text or making the text the same as the background color so no one can see it - you’re eventually going to fail at getting a consistent placement. You may think you’re hot when it works for a couple weeks, but in the end you’ll be knocked way down the list or out the results completely.

#10) Register Your Domain for a Long Time.
If your domain is only registered for 1 year, it doesn’t look as good to a search engine as it does if it is registered for 10 years. Why? Because search engines don’t like fly-by-night, get-rich-quick sites that aren’t reliable or worth anything. Be smart and register your domain for at least 3 years if you are serious about your business and what you are doing.

There are many other factors that contribute to a good Google Search Engine Ranking - but we’ve touched on several important ones that shouldn’t be underestimated.

“Everyone else is doing it, so why can’t we?” Yep, Cranberries references aside, we’re doing a blog. What took so long? Well, we’ve got a lot to say, but we don’t have ample time to type it up because we’re too busy working around the clock to give our customers quality web and graphic design services. We’re in the age-old situation where the shoemaker’s kids don’t have any shoes. In case you weren’t aware, Sleepless Media is a design firm located in the heart of Santa Cruz, California.  We put together cutting-dege web design, content management systems, and online stores for the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.

We plan on using this space to tell you about what’s going on with the company, offer helpful design/development tips, tutorials and resources and maybe even to vent a bit!

Stay tuned….