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Regardless of how technologically advanced a website is, if no one knows about it, the owner might as well send smoke signals to attract business. Sadly, even when a business does spend a lot of money developing an advanced website, most are lost in the vast expanse of cyberspace.
With so many websites on the net, the chances of finding one specific site, without a proper address, are about the same as winning the lottery. And with millions of new sites coming online every month, not all of them will attract the traffic needed to be successful. Check out the counters located at the bottom of many websites and you’ll find those numbers often make the whole process of establishing a web presence seem hardly worth the effort.
Without advanced services such as database marketing, search engine registration and optimization, or other effective traffic strategies, the visitor count is usually very low. And the truth is, if no one sees a website, there really is no point in having one!
Why do you have to
optimize your web pages for search
engines?
There are billions
of web pages on the Internet. It's
obvious that not all of them can be
listed in the top 10 results on
search engines. Search engines only
list web sites that they find
relevant to a special topic. You
must make sure that your web site is
such a site. If search engines
cannot find out that your web site
is about real estate, they
cannot give your web site high
rankings for that keyword. The
process of optimizing your web pages
so that search engines find them
relevant is called search engine
optimization (SEO).
Only a few web
surfers look further than the first
or second result page of a search
engine
75% of searchers
never look further than page one
(Source: Georgia Institute of
Technology). Most search engines
display ten results on the first
page; and very few searchers click
the links to look at the second
page.
Usability expert
Jakob Nielsen points out: "Users
almost never look beyond the second
page of search results." Danny
Sullivan, ClickZ Search Engine
Marketing Columnist, puts it out
this way: "Being listed 11 or beyond
means that many people may miss your
web site." |
