So, you’ve got your Web site up and running. Now what? Sit back and relax while the world pounds a path to your page? Better get comfortable, because you may be in for a long wait.
True, an Internet presence can bring in new business, but too often small-business owners hire someone to develop their Web page, then never think about it again, except maybe to update the content ever few months or so. In fact, a Web site needs to be promoted as aggressively as any product or service and monitored as closely as any advertising campaign. Web site development is just the first step in an ongoing marketing process.
“Having a successful Web site is more like a successful advertising campaign than having a software program written,” said Curt Anderson of Active Internet Marketing in Birmingham, Mich. “If you don’t promote your site, it’s like doing a four-color brochure, putting it in the supply closet and hoping potential clients come in and ask for it.”
The World Wide Web’s search engines will guide traffic to your site, so it’s crucial to register your domain name with each of these. However the search engines don’t all use the same criteria for indexing sites, nor do they handle search requests in the same way. Yahoo, for instance, which receives 70 million search requests each day, accepts only one out of 10 submissions for a listing. Even if a site is listed on Yahoo, it may be buried so deep in the list of search results -- say as number 1,012 out of 1,590-- that it might as well not be listed at all. A savvy Web marketer will know how to customize a Web site to increase its likelihood of not only getting listed on each of the search engines, but of appearing among the first three pages of a search’s results.
One way a search engine decides a site’s relevance is by looking at the number of links it has to and from other pages. The more links, the more relevant the site. However, links pose a threat to sites because they can carry traffic away, Anderson said, so it can require creative thinking to determine mutually beneficial link exchanges that won’t cost a business potential customers.
A Web site should also include as many key words as possible, repeated as often as possible throughout the site. However, this must be done without “stuffing,” the site with key words that are invisible to visitors, but detected by search engines. A “stuffed” site risks being blackballed by the search engine.
“You use all these tips and tricks to bop yourself up to the first three pages of a search engine,” Anderson said.
Finally, a small-business owner should monitor their Web presence as closely as they would any other marketing campaign. Anderson said his company provides monthly reports to its clients, showing its ranking on the major search engines, the number of visits to its site, as well as the number of visits to each page on its site. The report also includes information about competitor sites and details what search engines or links led visitors to the client’s site,
“Small businesses don’t have a lot of time or money, so they have to make sure their Web site is working harder for them,” Anderson said. “It’s a little espionage and a lot of persistence. You’ve got to be dogged about your Web marketing.”
