Doing SEO in Brussels, in the small world of European affairs, I have always been wondering if European actors really understand the importance of developing a strong visibility on the Internet. And, as far as I am concerned, a well-thought eMarketing strategy is a real guarantee of presence, visibility and influence on key issues.
However, European actors don’t seem to have understood this. I guess the reason is that communication managers working within industry federations, NGOs, etc., have not been trained to eMarketing. An example amongst other: let’s have a look to the website of DigitalEurope.org.
Digitaleurope.org’s case
This organization defines itself as a “pre-eminent advocacy group of the European digital economy acting on behalf of the information technology, consumer electronics and telecommunications sectors”. Basically, it regroups major ICT companies such as Microsoft to lobby the EU institutions.
Taking it account its profile, one might have thought that this organization would have a search engine optimized website. So, by curiosity, I first typed “Digital Europe” on Google.com. And, surprise, this is what I found:
I have never seen such a bad HTM title for a website: “digitaleurope.org – Hosted by One.com Webhosting”. What’s worse, is that if you click on it, here is what you see:
Well, it seems that their webmaster forgot to redirect digitaleurope.org to www.digitaleurope.org. This should not happen. I won’t do a full audit of the website of digitaleurope.org but I can tell you there are may SEO issues such as the already mentioned problem of redirection, the URL structure, the HTML titles, the few number of backlinks, etc.