Wipe Your Hands, Face or Feet!

Getting positioned for a life outside of local government is already becoming a viable option. Jamar Labs is the creation of two entrepreneurs in New York — a marriage of both wonderful products and product design. Their great Jamar Labs website, however, was getting no traffic. The brother of one of the entrepreneurs, a coworker of mine, came to me for SEO tips. After just a little analysis of the site, I discovered that except for the shopping cart, the site was 100% Flash driven by external actionscript. That meant it had no selectable text, no unique pages or page titles, and basically had no way to have new fresh content on a weekly basis. It did not meet accessibility or mobile device standards, and the only traffic it was getting was from the paid for Google ad bot.

A dismal dilemma for a start-up business! But also one that with a little effort could be quickly remedied. After gaining access to the site, I was able to utilize the resources available and restructure the site by handcoding with CSS to create what had been non-existent, unsearchable pages. There is more work to be done. The quick and dirty CSS needs to be turned into a clean style sheet, and the Flash movie restructured to a smaller animation to be inserted on the home page. But already there are some little amenities such as a favicon, a Questions with Janet page, and news on the front page.

The goal of course is not just a pretty and searchable website, but to get these great hand, feet, and face wipes into the hands of the folks who will love and benefit from them. That will take a bit more effort. SEO top priority is a well-designed site and content that changes on at least a weekly basis. For a commercial site however, a fee is required by the search engines to move a site into a nice viewable postion in the search results. And then there are all the basic marketing tools of the trade — getting in touch in a virutal way with the folks who will love the product! That’s where social media, TV, and other avenues prevail. But first the platform: a good search engine optimized website!