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SUCCESS ON THE WEB
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If you are
in business, then you already have a web site, are planning to have one,
or you know somebody who has one, or intends to have one. Yes, the world
wide web has gotten to be that big, that important, that ubiquitous.
Sometimes called the Web, or Net, this subset of the Internet, is the
biggest, most important marketing and information revolution of our
time, maybe even ever.
There are now approximately ten billion pages on several hundred million
web sites, growing at some 40,000 pages per week. Each week, there are
140 million searches for products, services, and information on Google
alone, and more on other search engines and directories such as AOL,
MSN, Lycos, HotBot, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, Teoma, and Yahoo. As a
directory, Yahoo is chock full of traffic on any given day at any given
time, i.e. 24/7 (twenty four hours a day, seven days a week).
Let’s get back to that idea about having a web site. Anyone on the Web
not only is interested in maximizing the number of visitors to their
site, but also wants to maximize sales revenue from the site, otherwise
what’s the point? How to be found is the next challenge after spending
thousands of dollars to get on the Web in the first place.
Let’s say the site owner is an auto dealer. Should be easy enough to
find a local dealer for any make of car we might want to look for,
right? However, the huge numbers involved on the Web often become a
barrier to being found and a barrier to finding just what someone wants
to find. Remember the billions and millions mentioned in the second
paragraph?
Using Lycos as my search engine for this examination of what I’m trying
to explain (http://www.lycos.com), because they give me the statistics I
want to share with you, I first look for automobiles, or autos (It
doesn’t matter, because “auto” is the stem word in either case.) Guess
how many web sites show up? 4,527,553, an awesome number indeed.
Searching on autos in our local market, the number is cut to 29,788 and
we begin to see several web sites that could be our source for cars, but
not some of the local dealers we already know about. Keep that thought
for a moment longer. If we look for a brand and make in our local
market, let’s say a Cadillac, we still hit on 13, 356, but nary a one in
our town. Strange, eh?
Looking for a supplier of another product we may want to find locally, I
look for jewelry. AltaVista found 8,241,581 results in the USA.
Narrowing the search to our area still yields 292 web sites, but only
one of the local stores we would expect to find. What’s going on here?
Why don’t we find our local friends when we look for their products and
services? One of two reasons: Either they do not have a web site as yet
– doubtful – or they haven’t paid an appropriate amount of attention to
the necessities of marketing within such a competitive environment.
Their web sites are almost throwaways; it’s as though somebody told them
they really needed to be on the world wide web, because that’s where the
action is. And it is, but there are a couple of steps to take to make a
web site into a web presence.
Pretty pages with super moving graphics are wonderfully creative and
instructive for humans to view, but such pages are anathema to the
search engines used by potential customers looking for products,
services, and information. Search engines like Google, for instance, can
not make any sense out of graphics; graphics cannot be read by them.
Search engines can only take in the meaning of machine readable text,
and far too often, the web design community has opted to go with the
easy flow of selling hot looking graphics that clients can look at and
go “Wow!”
Another factor often impedes the recognition of a web site’s existence,
the lack of good, search engine friendly information residing behind
home pages within the code supporting them. This information exists in a
structured format, and includes a title, a description of what the web
site is about, and a listing of the keywords searchers will use to look
for the products, services, and information the web site owner wants to
be found by as many people as possible. Many web sites lack this basic
information.
Finally, many web site owners, and some web site designers, also neglect
the importance of registering web sites with the group of search engines
that handle approximately 95% of all web searches. Without driving home
this very inexpensive step ($104), web sites will probably not be found.
Gone are the early days of six or seven years ago, when search engines
could easily track down every web site in existence. Registration
efforts weren’t needed then. But times have changed; with so many
billions of web pages on the Internet, it behooves every web site owner
to insist on the registration of his or her web site, either by their
web designer, or by a special group of web workers called search engine
optimizers, or SEO’s for short.
If you want to see the code behind any web page, go to the top line of
your browser, i.e. AOL, Explorer, or Netscape, and click on View; then
click on source, or page source. E’ voila! There it all is.
Bill Orr
bill@williamorr.com
March 2004 |
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