E-Commerce Technology Florida: Internet Marketing Benefits Article 1

The Information Super-Highway is Like a Shifting Sand Dune

Several years ago almost everyone was getting online and setting up their website for the first time, and businesses from small mom & pop shops to huge corporations like IBM were putting up websites for the purpose of describing their products and services and perhaps also sell them on-line. The corporations who have been very successful in the e-commerce arena have made millions and added a lucrative new revenue stream to their existing businesses. According to the latest release from the US Department of Commerce, online retail sales totaled $14.33 billion in Q4 2002 and $45.6 billion for the whole year, up 28.2% for Q4 2002 from Q4 2001.

Companies like Lands' End and Dell spend millions in advertising to promote their brand and this also drives traffic to their website. But what about all the smaller companies, many of which also may or may not sell products online, who decided to develop websites with the intention of promoting their company on the internet? What about all the companies out there who even paid to be submitted to the search engines, only to sit back and watch nothing happen? How many small to medium sized companies are out there who have websites and have registered with the search engines, that have never received a single email or phone call from an interested prospect who has just visited their site? How much of the $45.6 billion dollar pie went to the mom & pop shops selling their goods online?

There are literally thousands of websites out there that are essentially islands within the World Wide Web. They have no traffic coming to them from anywhere, even if they are registered with some of the top search engine and directory companies. This is because if your site is not easily found within the first 30-40 rankings for that search engine, chances are you will be too far down the list to get noticed by any one of the millions of web surfers out there every day. Unless you have the budget to advertise extensively to obtain traffic, your best, and potentially least expensive, option is to rank high in the top search engines and directories.

The internet truly is an information super-highway, with millions of visitors per day, however, the information super-highway "travels through" those sites which have the best rankings among the top search engines and directories. Websites with no prominence in those powerful engines are like dirt covered country back roads, and will never be found by anyone.

The largest companies with the multi-million dollar advertising budgets typically will not try to optimize their web site to draw internet traffic - they will be getting plenty of traffic from their other promotional efforts. Often web users can find these sites easily without using a search engine, and by just typing in their well branded name, such as ibm.com or dell.com. But thanks to the growing prominence of search engines, even a mom & pop shop can be found if their site ranks high enough in the search engines. And the way to achieving top rankings in the search engines is by writing, or optimizing, your website pages in such a way that takes advantage of the algorithms used by the search engine to rank the page near the top. And what is so wonderful about the internet for the mom & pop shops is that it is purely a technical issue, not a monetary one, that will get your website a ranking that will put its path square in the path of the information super-highway. Any mom & pop shop can achieve this with the right code behind their web pages, and rank right alongside companies that are hundreds of times their size.

The exact way to do this is called search engine optimization and it can get a bit complicated. This is because every search engine works differently, and because there is a lot of competition among companies optimizing their pages to sell the same types of items. However, by applying the right techniques to optimize your web pages, you can achieve a top ranking in the search engines. A top ranking in one of the more popular search engines puts your website square in the path of the information super-highway!

The problem is, however, that once you are square in the middle of the information super-highway one day, you may not be the next day. That is because the search engine companies are also constantly changing their internal algorithms, and your ranking will fall or change as a result.

Besides the issues surrounding the search engines discretion and ability to change the ranking algorithms at their whim, this also keeps what is becoming a niche industry in search engine optimization, or internet marketing, as it is sometimes called, on its toes. The information super-highway is constantly shifting like sand dunes as the search engine companies vary their algorithms, so it has become an entirely new industry just to watch what they are doing and adjust websites accordingly so that they will stay well positioned on the information super-highway.