Are you planning to give your bricks and mortar Business an Internet boost? Or are you starting a 100% online Business from the ground up? Perhaps you've already got some presence on the Web but aren't getting the results you were hoping for. You've come to the right place: this site is all about establishing an Internet presence. Our knowledge base site covers all aspects of the Internet process, from providing content for your website pages creation to using a link tracking script.

It's well known that 95% of Websites receive hardly any traffic at all and that even fewer generate substantial sales revenue for their owners. So, whilst promoting a Business through the Internet is one of the most cost effective means of publicising your Business, there is a considerable inherent risk of not getting any Return on Investment (ROI) on your efforts. We are here to minimise that risk and maximise the return you'll get from establishing an Internet presence.

Making sure your Website doesn't fall into that 95% category of Internet black holes that never get seen by anybody is actually easier than you might think. It's not that hard to avoid creating just another piece of barren cyber real estate because the vast majority of Webmasters go about developing their web presence exactly the wrong way around. It could be argued that while you'll face some stiff competition at the top, most of your competitors are actually weak. They literally put the horse before the cart by concentrating on monetisation rather than getting interested prospects first. By doing so, they end up with a great looking site, great lead generating systems and/or payment processor (shopping cart) and... no visitors to their site, no leads, no sales and no (or a negative) ROI! To avoid this obvious pitfall you need first and foremost to answer this question:

Where will my Website traffic come from?

Without a steady stream of targeted, pre-qualified prospects that are ready to buy from you, all your efforts at monetisation will be in vain, so monetisation shouldn't be your first priority. Building targeted Website traffic into you efforts should. Get visitors first and sales will follow.

So where will your visitors (henceforth referred to as "traffic") come from? To some extent that will be defined by the nature of your Business. We'll broadly categorise Businesses into three classes:

1. Strictly offline: no sales will occur on site and the Website will primarily generate sales leads. Typical example: a hotel may take bookings over the Internet through its Website.
2. Strictly online: such Businesses rely entirely on the Internet for sales revenue generation. Typical example: a niche software house will not attempt to sell over the counter, concentrating all efforts on the Internet instead.
3. Hybrids: Businesses that use dual delivery of sales revenue, over the counter as well as through the Internet. Typical example: most PC retailers have both Internet and High Street retail presence.

Business that fall into Class 1 or 3 stand a little aside because they may be able to generate substantial amounts of traffic by publicising their Website address on the back of their standard offline advertising efforts. You see this time and time again where a Company puts their Website address on literally everything that goes out, from customer receipts and invoices to shopping bags and packaging, to direct mailings, to TV and radio ads. This process is known as branding. Whatever the size of the offline operation it should always take advantage of this method of publicizing the Website address. But for smaller offline Businesses the amount of traffic this method can yield is by definition limited and branding cannot be the sole method for generating traffic. That's the prerogative of the Blue Chips, not the SME.

Businesses that fall into Class 2 cannot rely on offline advertising and must make sure their Website is found by Internet users, otherwise all their efforts will be in vain.

Let's face it: unless you're one of the top leading sites like Google, Yahoo!, AOL, eBay, AMEX etc. nobody is actually looking for YOU. If they knew your site they would simply type its name into their browser. Instead Internet surfers aren't looking for "you" (or "me" or "him" for that matter): they are looking for products or services that you (and many others beside you) provide. And they do so by using Search Engines… over 90% of Internet users find the information/products/services they are looking for using Search Engines, in particular the "Big Three": Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Getting your site found in Search Engines is the subject of a large part of this Website but details on how to achieve that objective are outside the scope of this page. Suffice it to say that most surfers rarely look beyond the first three result pages (the first thirty results). To be found the pages of your Website will have to appear on these top results pages on keywords/key phrases that are highly relevant to your pages.

This leads us to introduce two broad but useful concepts:

Search Engine friendliness and User friendliness

1. Search Engine friendliness: Websites that rank highly under the search terms that are relevant to them are Search Engine friendly because they are obviously doing what the Search Engines like best.
2. User friendliness: Website design, ease of navigation, good quality copy and may other factors contribute to making the visitor experience a memorable one and will increase conversions and possibly repeat visits/sales.

Search Engine friendliness and User friendliness usually don't "sit well together", with Search Engine friendly sites being often less user friendly and vice versa. This is related to the way Search Engines read, index and rank Web pages. Most major SEs don't use human editors to index a page, instead they use software, colloquially known as robots, bots, spiders or crawlers. One limitation of using software of this type is that any Web page content that is in graphical (or Flash or audio) form cannot be read by spiders. So, content that is perfectly intelligible to human visitors actually means nothing to spiders unless that content was present in plain, readable text, rather than in graphical formats.

Spiders can read but they can't see

Yes, plain readable text (HTML) is what spiders like best, the rest they'll simply "crawl around". Plain text is also known as spiderbait because it's what they will devour and take back to the SE's ranking algorithm that will decide the fate of the page in the index of the SE.

Take also into account that SEs try their very hardest to present surfers with fresh, unique, relevant and interesting content, after all an SE is only as good as the results it returns on a search query. The pivotal role of readable, unique, relevant and interesting content now becomes apparent.

In contrast, all the flashy graphics and gizmos that make many Websites such works of art and so user friendly fall on blind eyes to spiders. Pages with little or no spiderable text will not score very well in the SE's index and will usually appear outside the 30 or so first results, if they appear at all. Net result: no or very little traffic and... no ROI!

So, clearly this presents a conflict between Search Engine friendliness and user friendliness. Any Web page will have find the right compromise between both aspects, to ensure it receives a steady stream of SE traffic on the one hand, and is user friendly enough to convert visitors into paying customers on the other hand.

And here we arrive at the first and most fundamental decision that needs to be made by anyone who wants to develop an Internet presence for their Business: how Search Engine friendly and how user friendly do we make our Website. The answer lies to some extent in the answer to the previous question we posed: where will my Website traffic come from?

Obviously , if you're not going to rely on Search Engine traffic at all (or hardly) and instead will rely on offline publicising or even banding, then Search Engine friendliness becomes much less important. Of course relatively few Businesses are in that enviable position.

Content is King!

If your Business relies 100% (or almost) on Internet users as prospects and paying customers alike, providing great content to boost rankings should precede the use of Flash and audio presentations, excessive graphics and such like.

It's often overlooked that well written, relevant, interesting and unique copy doesn't only make great spiderbait: it's also a great sales tool. Great copy shows you're an expert on your topic and warms prospects up to the monetisation point.

Developing your Web business, not just a Website!

Before you start enthusiastically constructing a state of the art Website always try and answer the questions that were raised on this page. By following the guidelines presented on this site, you'll be building a Business, not a "show home" Website that doesn't get seen by anyone.