Since the Internet has millions of surfers, a few people mistakenly believe that, business will increase radically if they put up a website. Since there are many web developer and administrator, people regularly have this question in their mind, if they should get a website. Moreover, they wrongly believe that, if they put up a website, business will increase significantly, since there are millions of surfers on the Internet.
This is as if, if someone opens a store in a city, which has millions of people, his/her sales should increase uncontrollably but this is not exactly how it works.
How does a person know where to find one? This is the big question on the Internet as in any conventional business.
Sarcastically, it’s probably easier with a conventional business to open a store on a busy main road and do well from day one. On the other hand, it’s not that simple on the Internet as any “busy thoroughfare,” is already someone else’s website. For a new website, only with a vigorous promotional campaign, heavy traffic, and subsequent sales comes.
There was in fact a way to get inexpensive Internet traffic with little or no promotion in the past. Eight or nine years back (the Internet, as we know it, is little more than a decade or so old) i.e. is during the “gold rush” days of the Internet, if one had a generic name like cars.com, stocks.com, books.com, or store.com, he/she could expect instant success. Such names were so generic in nature, that they invariably generated huge traffic.
One cannot get such names for the going away prices of between $10 and $35 but he/she will get such names for several hundred thousand dollars, or, in some case, millions of dollars.
There are also the old standbys (search engines) to generate traffic; some of the top search engines and their addresses are as under: -
AltaVista – altavista.com
AskJeeves – askjeeves.com
AOL – aol.com
Google – google.com
Yahoo! – Yahoo.com
Hotbot – hotbot.lycos.com
WiseNut – wisenut.com
inktomi – inktomi.com
LycosFast – lycos.com
MSN Search – search.msn.com
Open Directory Project (ODP) – dmoz.org
Teoma – teoma.com
With the help of software programs and web applications, ones site will be submitted to hundreds or even thousands of search engines. However, when it comes to the top search engines, it’s suggested to actually visit each one of their sites and submit ones website manually.
Why should one submit site manually?
Few search engines don’t allow automatic program submissions. 90% of search-engine generated traffic is accounted by major search engines; as they are very important, they cannot be left to an automated procedure.
Getting, “targeted traffic” is a very important aspect of doing business on the web. Getting people whom in some way or the other are associated with or have already shown interest in ones product or service is targeted traffic.
Practically every search engine asks for a “category.” One will be maximizing on “quality” traffic by choosing a category that properly describes, or at least comes as close as possible to describing, ones website.
One will be wasting time, money and efforts by specifying the “wrong” category or neglecting it overall. For example, if one is running a sweets shop, and he/she chooses category like “astrology,” getting tons of people who are looking for horoscopes won’t add much to his/her pocket — unless he/she happens have a page telling about peoples horoscopes in the website.
To conclude if one is going to spend time and money on a website, he/she should do it in a right procedure, and for the right reasons. And should not ask himself the same old dreamy question, to be or not to be (a webmaster), instead one should ask himself the other philosophical question with which philosophers are still struggling with like: If their website fades in the jungle of websites, and his/her website is not been noticed, did it make a sound in his/her pocket?
Author:Webhosting
I feel that the heading of this post is slightly misleading, leaving the casual reader with a gloomy outcome of getting their business online. As a small business owner before I became a web developer, I can tell you that starting out online can be extremely confusing and can lead you down many paths, of which very few will lead to success.
This DOSE NOT MEAN there is no hope! It simply means that you have been influinsed by one of the thousands of internet voices who wish for you to use their services and leave out crucial pieces to the puzzle.
If you are a small business website who would simply like to drive customers to your business and could care less if people ever land on your website then there are relatively simple ways to do this. “20% of PC searches ( 2.2 billion) in the US each month have a local intent
local searches constitute 40% of all mobile searches” http://libertywebmarketingandseo.com/765/how-local-search-can-increase-sales-for-your-business/, This means that many of the consuming internet searchers out there are simple looking for a new restaurant or a good local auto body shop.
You can tap into this traffic generation by creating local listing through yellowpages, google places etc.
A website is still a crucial piece to the puzzle. Sparing you a novel or two of information on Search Engine Optimization, in simple terms, you must have a website that has keywords or phrases somewhere on it so a search engine such as google or yahoo, has some text to reference and show your consumers.
Point being, if you wish to just drive qualified traffic to your site for cheap then get a hold of any local listing you can find (the majority of which are free) and come up with a good strong sentence or two describing your business and post the listing manually. Make sure to use any and all references that will list your location on a map, as this will reduce the amount of work for the searcher and in turn get customers to your door step quicker.
As far as a website with the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) requirements go, the sky is the limit, or in this case your market is the limit. A basic SEO package should be found at a relatively low cost for the return you will see on your investment. Having a pretty website up with all the bells and whistles is great Just don’t pay the huge fee for it if you’re not going to be selling your product online. To increase your local sales a very basic site will do the job. That being said I HIGHLY recommend not using a web template. Being a developer and SEO professional myself I can attest to the ugly generated code that goes into these template builders, that will do little to nothing for driving anysort of traffic to your site. Remember the search engines that need to be able to search your site for content (text) and get something meaningful out of it to relay to the person searching a term.
Good luck and choose wisely…
Cody Sims
with http://visualecomm.com