Building a successful Web site is a Science

This article is not about information technology resellers or technology marketing, but it shows the point that technology is significant in everything we do today.

Friday, March 5, 2010
Building a successful Web site is a science
Jacksonville Business Journal - by Dolly Penland Correspondent
James Crichlow

Lime Leaf Thai Restaurant principals Vilayvanh Lovan, Songkhame Lovan, Kevin Anderson and Noi Anderson. Lime Leaf includes customer reviews as well as menus on its Web site.

Many small-business owners wrongly believe that just having a presence on the Web is enough to promote their businesses — an “if you build it, they will come” mentality. But a static site that amounts to no more than an ad doesn’t add value to the business.

This is especially important because only 8 percent of people look beyond the third page of search results, according to a 2008 Jupiter Research survey. Digital research site comScore Inc. reports Americans made 15.2 billion searches in January, with 65 percent of those conducted via Google. Yahoo! accounted for 17 percent, Microsoft Corp. 11 percent, and Ask Network and AOL combined for a little more than 7 percent of searches. With so much information and so many sites out there, small businesses must do whatever they can to stand out, attract traffic to their sites and make sales.

“There are literally tens of millions of Web sites coming on the Internet every other month,” said David Brown, chairman and CEO of Web.com. “As a result, if you just build a site and don’t use the science of optimization, you’ll probably be found deep in the pages, eighth or 80th. Search engine optimization is a science, but there’s some art to it, too. The science is understanding how the search engines, primarily Google but also Yahoo!, Microsoft and some others, determine relevancy.

“They determine relevancy based on things like key word density, how many times certain words are in your Web site, key word location on the home page, how many links to your Web site there are from other sites that are credible and how many links you have outbound to those kinds of sites, how often you are mentioned in blogs and what kind of information you provide that proves your relevancy.”