Learn/Free-Webs.com-Websites:-Pros-and-Cons

By [[User:|]] on This article is a work in progress. Have suggestions for this article? Email me.

When choosing a tool or content management system to build your website with, there are many things to consider. In addition to considering the price and how easy it is to use, it's important to know how much control you will have over your website and whether it will allow you to create a website that can rank well in search engines and follow SEO best practices.

Is a Webs.com website what you want? Here's my review and analysis

Pros:

  • Webs.com is a free way to create and host a website. You can't beat that price.
  • It's easy to create a attractive website how you want it. You don't need to know any code, and it's a drag-and-drop interface to make a site.
  • You can buy lease a domain name (like YourBusinessName.com) and set your Webs website to live at that URL, instead of a URL like webs.com/yourpage or yourpage.webs.com. (You can purchase the domain through any registrar, or from Webs.com. If you buy it from Webs.com, that will give you ad-free hosting.)
  • Webs.com websites are not Flash-based. Flash websites aren't great for SEO because it's hard for search engines to see or read the text that's there, because it's often hidden in an image or animation.
  • Webs.com has been around since 2001.

Cons:

  • Free Webs.com websites carry a small ad at the bottom saying "Create a Free Website" and linking to Webs.com.
  • (CRIB) If you add an H1 heading to a page, it will be the same as the page's title tag. For SEO, it's best to make these different because you can target different keywords, but it's not an SEO problem to have them the same.
  • In your free Webs.com website, you can only set one title tag and meta description that applies to all of your website's pages. Duplicate title tags and meta descriptions aren't good for your SEO, and they're a missed opportunity to optimize each of your pages for the most appropriate keywords. For more info, read why duplicate meta descriptions and duplicate title tags aren't good. (If you pay for a premium Webs.com account, this unique titles and meta descriptions becomes an available feature.)

Examples of Webs.com websites, but they all seem to be paid - few with ads and no "created using webs.com"

Want help using Webs.com? Visit their FAQ/Help page.

Alternative Free Website Creators

There are many other free website builders out there. Compare Weebly to some others:

  • WordPress.com can be a good solution if you want more power to improve your SEO, and you still want a pretty easy tool to create and update a free website. Read WordPress: Built for SEO for more information. I would say that it isn't as easy as Wix or other drag-and-drop type website creators, but WordPress is still fairly simple to use.
  • Webs.com is an easy website builder like Wix, and it's SEO-friendly. It also has many add-on services you can purchase to... "With Webs Premium Services, you can also generate custom page meta tags for your site." Tweet: "Custom meta tags is a Premium only feature. Site tags can be added for free on via the site settings page"
  • Google Sites
  • Yahoo Sites: "The Yahoo SiteBuilder did not include the heading tag as an option in their standard formatting. However, through the use of HTML I was able to hand-code heading tags into the document. Unfortunately making the heading tags render properly in a browser requires major reworking and cleaning up of messy code. Also it assumes that the webmaster’s knowledge includes defining styles to page elements to ensure they render attractively in a browser. Due to the reworking necessary to make heading tags work properly with Yahoo SiteBuilder pages, I’d only recommend trying this if you’re an intermediate or master HTML coder. Sadly, this will exclude many from using this feature. (read more: http://searchengineland.com/free-web-design-tools-from-the-big-three-seo-friendly-or-not-11133 )"


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