Is it Really That Important to Have a Website?

A good website opens your doors to an estimated 1,407,724,920 internet users worldwide, a pool of potential customers impossible to imagine before the internet took off. This means it will give you a business advantage if you can create a high quality, useful website which will rank well in search engines.

Uses for a website

There are a wide range of uses for a company website. It can be used as:

A promotional medium to bring new people to you through search engines

A hub for all your key company and product information, minimizing the need for large and expensive print runs of promotional brochures

Any easy point of contact, where potential customers can learn about your company and products or services at their leisure

A place where you can interact with your customers or potential customers - learn their opinions, get feedback and glean important information on their likes and dislikes

An online selling tool for services or products that can be easily transported

In today's business world, marketing over the internet has become an integral part of everyday working life. 80% of internet users search for goods and services on the web and are put in touch with businesses they would never have had access to in the past.

Stand out from the crowd

In today's internet driven market place, companies without a website risk losing out to their competitors and miss out on reaching thousands of potential customers every day. But with so many websites out there and online advertising spend growing six times faster than traditional media, how can your website stand out from the crowd?

You can use traditional media to promote your site, increase traffic and give people an easy way to get in touch, but most people now use search engines to find what they are looking for. There is a vast amount of traffic out there on the internet, so search engines, such as Google, help people wade through it efficiently by rating websites and listing them in an order which reflects their quality and relevance to the search.

Google, for instance, will send web spiders out to look at a site which will rank the site depending on its quality and how relevant the content is to the keywords being used.

Understanding Google's rules and manipulating your site to make the most of the new algorithms is better left to the experts! However, there are a few simple things you can do to quickly improve your ranking. Here are some top tips from Mike Knivett MD of Artemis Internet Marketing:

1. Use an experienced web designer who knows what Google is looking for to maximize the rating of your site from day one.

2. Choose a recognizable domain name which is closely related to your business and the key words you expect people to type in. Rather than just the name of your company, why not have the domain about what you do.

3. Create an informative, well-designed website and ensure the key words your customers will search for feature many times in the text. Make sure it also reads well though, Google are wary of an artificially high keyword density and can penalize you for it.

4. Do not design your website in Java script or Flash, it might be good from a design point of view, but the search engines can't read it so you will never rank well

5. Create a links page and exchange relevant, useful links with other businesses e.g. if you are a health club, link to a beauty salon and distributors of fitness clothes and equipment. Beware of linking to irrelevant businesses, Google considers this misleading and could penalize you for it by decreasing your ranking

SEO Pitfalls

When implementing your changes, be patient. Ranking organically through search engines takes time - usually two to three months for a new site. Google has spiders constantly crawling the web looking for new sites or changes to the site, but it takes them time to process all the data.

If you need to be on the front page fast, then you can run a Pay per Click (PPC) campaign. This means you run ads on the Google search pages, but only pay when someone clicks through to your site. This can be a great way to get listed quickly, but you need to know what you are doing so you don't pay too much for irrelevant clicks that won't convert into a lead.

Be realistic on what you can achieve for your budget and depending on the amount of competition in your area. If you are working in a highly competitive marketplace where your competitors already have professional and optimized websites it will be difficult for you to be in position one without investment in PPC advertising or other forms of Search Engine Marketing. If you are using a search engine optimization firm, make sure you make clear your aims for the site and be wary of large and unrealistic promises.

Great rankings in the major search engines is not something that can be achieved over night and SEO activity is an ongoing job. Google is constantly changing its rules, so you need to keep up to date with their best practice recommendations and tweak your website accordingly. You should also be analyzing the results of your changes with programmes like Google analytics to see which changes make a difference to not only your search engine ranking, but also to the percentage of lead conversions and the amount of time a visitor stays on the site. Regular changes, monitoring and being creative will keep that ranking high.

Make the internet work for you

With the amount of people using the internet and its global reach, the business possibilities are endless, so don't let yourself down with a badly designed website that the search-engines can't find. Think carefully about what you want to achieve with your website, the key capabilities it must have and then talk to a professional Internet Marketing company to make it happen.

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