Coal Harbour Community Centre recently merged its website with Vancouver’s West End Community Centre and Barclay Manor. Up till the merger, you could find the Coal Harbour Community Centre simplying by searching for “Coal Harbour” in Google. Now it only comes up if you search for “Coal Harbour Community” or “Coal Harbour Community Centre” – and it’s buried under a site called “West End Community”. Over at Yahoo, even “Coal Harbour Community Centreâ€? returns a page for “West End CC”, which most people would not recognize as affiliated with Coal Harbour – and the second hit is a PDF, which most people wouldn’t open. MSN doesn’t list the Coal Harbour Community Centre in its first page of hits.

By overhauling your website, you can gain efficiencies, increase awareness, improve navigation and achieve other benefits. But, in doing so, you may affect your search engine rankings. If web users can’t find the site they’re looking for, it doesn’t matter how much time and effort you put into designing a great site. The new Coal Harbour and West End Community Centre website could be better optimized for search engines, without great expense or effort. So, if you’re revamping your website, take search engine rankings into account. It’s easier to design things right the first time than it is to try to regain Google’s attention later.

Incidentally, the official Coal Harbour Community Centre site is here.

(c) 2005 by Andrea Coutu. Vancouver Marketing Consultant. All rights reserved.