Don't Fire Your Web Site!

by Bill Treloar

From BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY TODAY,
Morris County Chamber Of Commerce
Business Technology Committee
June 26, 2002 Issue #21

Your web site is a valuable employee for your business. It's a member of your Sales Department, your Corporate Affairs Department, your Advertising Department, your Human Resources Department, and maybe even more. You've invested a lot in this employee: development costs, maintenance costs, and monthly hosting costs. If it's not generating enough revenue to offset those costs, you may be tempted to fire it.

Don't! At least not without giving your web site a fighting chance to prove its worth to your organization. Why isn't any new business coming from the web site? Probably because not enough customers are getting onto the web site. Why not? Maybe because they can't find it.

The most important way new customers find their way to your web site is through search engines. Visitors who find your web site through a search engine are targeted customers because they were actively searching for what you sell.

Want to know if that's your problem?

Conduct A Simple Test

Think like a customer who wants your most important or most profitable product or service but doesn't know the name of your business. Go into any of the major search engines and try to look up your own web site just like that customer would.

Does your web site show up in the first 30 listings? Is it in the first three pages of results? If not, customers aren't finding you. People don't have the patience to scroll through page after page of listings to find your business.

For potential customers to find your site, you need to get it into the top 30 listings on most of your important keywords in most of the important search engines. And the way to do that is with search engine positioning.

Search Engine Positioning

Search engine positioning involves making changes to your web site that will cause it to appear closer to the top of the listing when someone searches for your product or service. It's a proven technology that makes a real difference in the number of visitors to a web site.

While professional search engine positioning can be a complex undertaking, one of the most important things you can do to improve your ranking in the search engines is to make sure the keyword that potential customers will use to search for you appears more than once on your web page. Another is to submit your site to the search engines your potential customers are likely to use, rather than relying on each search engine to find your site by itself. Some search engines handle many more searches than others, and some sites charge a fee to ensure up-front visibility, so you'll need to do some homework. But don't let that deter you; the return on that effort is well worth the trouble. There are many ways to improve the performance of your web site with a little business sense and the right Internet marketing advice.

About the Author: Bill Treloar is president of Treloar Associates in East Hanover, NJ, a consulting firm specializing making Internet marketing and search engine placement more efficient and cost effective.