I don’t really agree with this. Dr. Ken Evoy and his team are constantly scouring web trends and evaluating their long-term hardiness and usefulness. And then they tell SBI owners about it in the weekly newsletter and on the forums. They do know what’s going on and Site Build It reflects it. Does that mean they’ll jump on every emerging trend? No, definitely not. Because trends don’t always have lasting power. They also don’t recommend anything black hat or illegal.

That’s because Dr. Ken and his team are all about learning how to build a web business that works for today… and on into the future.

Here are some of the justifications you’ll read for SBI being out of date, as well as my responses…

• The website templates are old-fashioned and non-web 2.0 looking. True, if you’re only looking at their original 20 designs, the ones that were packaged with SBI when it was first rolled out, nearly a decade ago. But, SBI ran a design contest a few years ago that netted around 70 or 80 new designs that you could upload to their blockbuilder as your template. Then, again, they ran another design contest about 2.5 years ago that netted yet another 100 new designs. So we’re now up to almost 300 templates, all free to use. And, to make things better, you can completely customize any of those templates, by changing color schemes, header graphics, etc. Or, you can start from scratch and design your own graphics and colors. Take a look at my 7 SBI sites (in the right sidebar) and you’ll see the kind of variety you can get with SBI, even in the blockbuilder. If you’re comfortable with working with HTML code, you can even upload your completely customized website, bypassing the blockbuilder altogether. And that can be based on ANY template you desire, as long as it is coded in HTML (not PHP or ASP). Sure, you’ll still see a lot of SBI websites that use the old designs, but that’s only because their owners have been focusing more on building their content than on designing a glitzy look and feel. They have their priorities straight too. They can always go back later and upgrade the design, once their site has begun to work for them.
• SBI doesn’t use up to date SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it means doing certain things to your content that help search engines see what it is about and to assign it a high value so that your pages show up in the first 3 pages of search result listings if possible. Again, SBI DOES understand SEO and they help you understand it too. They have a really powerful tool that you can run on every single page you build, whether it’s in the block builder or uploading your own HTML pages, called Analyze It. Analyze It looks at all kinds of on-page factors to see if you have used your keywords in the right places, with the right frequency and many other issues. If you haven’t, they tell you why it’s important to change, even how important it is. Dr. Ken Evoy talks about how while SEO is important, it’s not the be-all and end-all to success on the Web, no matter what you’ve heard. These days, what Dr. Ken has been telling us for years is widely acknowledged… the best way to get ranked by the search engines is to build lots of well-written, niche-focused content. The rest will happen naturally. Want proof? Search on a keyword… I’m betting you’re going to find at least one SBI site in the first 30 sites (3 pages) of search results. Or look at the SBI Results Page, where you can check out hundreds of SBI-built websites that rank in the top 1% of all websites on the Internet.
• SBI hasn’t kept up with the times, though it may once have been good. Wrong again… SBI is constantly changing. In the last year or two, they’ve added a social bookmarking tool for your pages and a Web 2.0 style module that enables your visitors to contribute content to your site. SBI was also the first to develop an automated Google Sitemaps, within 48 hours of Google launching it. Ditto for Yahoo!’s version. And it’s still the most automated system for sitemaps. SBI has an unmatched database of sites, submissions, spider behavior, indexing and ranking and is constantly tweaking and improving site-management algorithms. This is cutting edge stuff and the best part is that the SBI owner does not have to spend a second worrying about it. Don’t believe me? Check out their Proof Page.

There may be other variations on this theme, but rest assured… Site Build IS with the times and so will your site be if you build it using Site Build It’s tools. You may even be cutting edge in your niche!