Why web marketing matters

With the Internet rapidly replacing the print Yellow Pages as the place where consumers let their fingers do the walking, it is vital for every business to have a strong and effective Internet presence.

This is especially true at times like these, when you need all the business leads you can get.

The way most people find things on the web is through the use of Google or similar sites called search engines. Here’s a quick, behind-the-scenes peek at what Google does:

You tell Google what you want to know by typing key words into a box and hitting “enter.” Hundreds of computers instantly sift through data that has been gathered and indexed from millions of websites.

When the computers find sites containing your keywords, they use several complex and secret mathematical formulas to rank the pages by relevance. Then, they display the results on a page like the one at right. Amazingly, it all happens in well under a minute. As you can see in the in the red oval on the sample page, Google found more than 175,000 responses to the terms “Goodyear” and “Naperville.

From your own experience, you know that you seldom go beyond the first pages or two of search results. So, the trick to being found on the web is to get as close as possible to the top of the first page of the search results. That’s what we can help you do.

1 “Global Yellow Pages: Battered by Broadband,” a research report by Deutsche Bank (April, 2007)

2 Google is, by far, the biggest search engine, serving 60% of all traffic

Getting to the top of the list

There are two ways to get to the top of the first page at Google and the other search engines. One is to buy ads from the search engine and the other is to do it for free.

While many businesses find it valuable to advertise on the search engines, every business should be going after a top position in the free listings. So, let’s start there.

The free listings are the results that appear on the left-hand side of a page of search returns. The listings result strictly from the search engine’s determination of which websites will provide the most relevant response to the keywords submitted by the user. Google will decide your page rank according to how well you do the several things we explain below. Hang on. We’ll get there soon.

The other way to get to a prominent position on Google or another search site is to buy an ad.

Ads on Google and most other search engines appear to the right (and sometimes immediately above) the free listings. The ads are called pay-per-click ads, because the advertiser pays Google only when a site visitor actually clicks on them. Advertisers bid for position by promising to pay the search engine a certain fee for each click. The advertiser offering $5 per click typically appears higher than someone offering $3.

Studies have shown that many search-engine visitors do not pay attention to the ads on the right side of the page, so your first investment in web marketing always should be to do the things that will get your site to the top of the free listings on the left side of the page.

Of course, millions of consumers do pay plenty of attention to search ads. That’s why more than $21 billion was spent on search advertising in 2007, making it the fastest-growing category of them all3.

We can help you decide whether search advertising is advisable for your business. We even can do it for you, as discussed below. But let’s stick for now with the free way of getting found on the Internet.

It starts with your website

You can’t be found on the Internet unless you have a website. If you don’t have one – or feel it may be time to upgrade your existing site – we can help, as discussed below.

Whether you have a simple site or an elaborate one, your website is only a starting point. If the words on your site are not properly chosen or not presented correctly in the computer code driving your website, then your site may be overlooked or improperly indexed by the search engines.

Not only will the time and money you invested in your website go to waste but you also may lose a significant amount of potential business.

Unfortunately, you can’t just tune your website one time and forget about it. Because the web is a dynamic and constantly changing environment, the visibility you gain one day can be lost the next. How can that be?

A quick explanation of how the web works will answer that question. We promise to keep it as non-technical as possible.

“Internet Advertising Bureau Revenue Report” by Price Waterhouse Coopers (May, 2008).

How the web works

As you know, a website is a place on the Internet with a unique address where the owner can post words, pictures, audio and video for others to see. But there’s a lot more to a website than meets the eye.

The computer code that enables the presentation of the site’s content includes a complex series of technical commands. Some of those commands display things a human can see, like words and pictures. But many of the commands are cues to help computers communicate with one another to identify, transmit and display your page on the World Wide Web.

In many ways, the “invisible” commands in the computer code running your website are more important to your visibility on the web than the things you can see. Here’s why:

As search engines scan the web to find new content, they look only at the words and commands in the “invisible” code on your site. If your site shows a picture of a canoe under a headline saying “We Sell Great Stuff,” the search engine has no idea what you sell, unless the word “canoe” is contained somewhere in your “invisible” code. Similarly, you will be overlooked, if your site says “We Serve the Best Chili in Town” but doesn’t include the name of your town (and neighboring places) in either the visible text or the “invisible” code.

If you don’t put correct keywords like “canoe” or the name of your town on your site – or, worse, choose the wrong ones – then search engines won’t include your site when they provide results to potential customers looking for businesses like yours. If you sell tires, you may want your site to name individual brands or terms, so someone searching for “Goodyear” or “radials” can find you. Instead of saying you serve “Chicagoland,” you may want your site to specify that you have stores in Hinsdale, Naperville, Evanston, South Holland and so forth.

The best selection of keywords won’t help you be found on the web if the “invisible” computer code driving your site has been poorly constructed or badly maintained. Even a great-looking site can have technical problems. And the best-designed sites require constant maintenance to make sure they continue to function properly.

Maintenance isn’t simple and it can’t be done just a few times a year, because all the factors affecting your visibility on the web change every minute of every day.

Keeping up with the dynamic web

Unlike a brochure that is frozen in time when it comes off the printing press, your website lives in a dynamic environment, where several factors affecting your visibility continue changing all at once.

New information is added to the web every second. To keep up, the search engines scour the web continuously to acquire and index the ever-changing content. As new content is identified, the search engines dynamically re-order of the results they display in response to queries. Thus, the same query often produces different results on different days. Sometimes, the results change from hour to hour.

Because fresh information typically replaces old information on search engines, websites that have not been updated for a period of time are considered to be stale. Even if they are perfectly maintained and contain all the right keywords, stale sites will slide down the list of search results until they are so low that few searchers will notice them in the pages and pages of results delivered by the search engine.

Google also gives higher ranking in its results to sites that have been mentioned by other websites. Those mentions come in the form of “links,” which are the underlined words that typically appear in light-blue type on most websites. An important part of building and maintaining the prominence of your site is seeking links from other credible sites. A large number of fresh, quality links will enhance your rank when Google sorts its search results.

Keeping up with all these tasks would seem to be enough. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

Google and the other search engines continuously refine and change the computer programs they use to index and rank search results. This is done in part to improve the results delivered to users but also to frustrate the small population of site operators who employ unscrupulous means to try to improve the ranking of their pages. In other words, Google and the other search engines keep changing the rules to prevent people from breaking them.

Thus, a perfectly constructed website with great keywords and the very best links is likely to lose its prominence in a matter of months if it is not updated to conform to Google’s ever-changing standard.

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