Running an E-Business is easy. Running a successful E-Business is not. There is no easy road to the E-Business Success. The recipe for the success consists of many diverse ingredients. The very first step in building a successful E-Business is giving it a “virtual home”. Once the virtual home is found and secured, the next step is to start receiving “guests” (aka Website visitors). The more visitors you are going to attract, the faster your customer base is going to grow. The main question is – how to attract visitors to the Website?
Your customers-to-be can come from a variety of sources. Some will be referred to you by your trading partners, some by a word-of-mouth and some will find you while browsing the Web. As time goes by and your fame grows, your URL is going to become a household name. But how to attract the initial visitors when your business is just starting out? The visitors are not going to find your Website unless you position it strongly with the main-stream search engines such as Google, Ask Jeevs and Lycos. A simple way to achieve good positioning is through subscribing to a service like Google AdWords. Google AdWords is going to display links to your Website along with the search results. The cost of joining AdWords is relatively low and there is a simple step-by-step process for joining the program and executing it effectively. Alternatively, you can submit your Website to search engines and aim at attracting the Web surfers who are shopping around for products and services similar or identical to the ones you have on offer. However, you are not going to be visible to them without a consistent search engine optimization strategy.
Search Engine optimization involves improving your Website’s positioning with the search engines through identification of the key words and phrases that customers are using to search for products and services you offer. There are plenty of SEO (search engine optimization) tools at the disposal of the E-marketers. However, while at first sight, SEO appears to be simple and easy, it usually turns out to be a fairly challenging task.
Business owners love talking about their companies. They go to great length in explaining the products and services they have on offer but when it comes to SEO they discover that it is nevertheless very difficult to put together a concise (just a few words/phrases) description of what their companies have on offer. Entrepreneurs are no mind-readers, yet in order to promote their sites effectively, they need to come up with a description that is going to match the search parameters that customers are most likely to enter.
SEO is more than a summary of a mission statement or a product list. It also incorporates the “common men’s” prospective and perceptions of the commercial services that are (or should be) available online as well as WWW in general. Most Internet searches incorporate words such as “cheap”, “best”, ‘deals” “discount” etc. Thus, you need to consider using these words in the site description you are submitting to the search engines.
Once the SEO process is complete and your Website is submitted to the search engines, it is worthwhile giving its “searchability” a test-run. The best test-run that you can possibly think of does not involve hiring services of E-Business professionals. All you have to do is to request your family and friends to choose a search engine (e.g.Google) and to carry out a random search for you company’s Website. If the search proves to be successful for the majority of the “investigators”, it is going to be the best confirmation of your job well done. If the Website does not come up during the search, it means that the SEO has been unsuccessful and your selection of key words and phrases needs to be reviewed to close the gap between the two.
SEO is a gradual process. There is always space for improvement. Besides, your target market and consumers’ preferences may change over the time, so be prepared to adjust your Website’s description on an ongoing basis. True, running a successful E-Business is not just about SEO and the visitors it is going to attract to your Website, but that’s where it all starts!
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