| |
Using SEO to Effectively Market your Company
Hundreds of millions of Websites exist today. As far as domain names and new pages of content go, they’re off the charts as well. Statistics from August of 2001 listed 513.41 people on-line worldwide
According to Alexa Internet Worldwide, there were 1.5 million sites born every day in 1998. Alexa also indicated that about half of all internet traffic that year was steered toward the top 900 sites available.
Gregory Gromov, in an on-line piece about the history of the World Wide Web, reported that internet traffic grew more than 100% in 2001. Gromov’s report (“Roads and Crossroads of Internet History” on http://www.netvalley.com/) also includes a staggering chart detailing the exponential growth of the net over the last thirty years. In 1969, when the internet was just a concept Al Gore was working on, there were just four hosts by Gromov’s count. By July of 2001 that number had grown to 126 million hosts. Gromov’s chart estimates that there were 30 million domains in 2001 and 28,200,000 Websites. Compare that to 1998 numbers of just 4,300,000 domains and 4,270,000 Websites.
Why? Is human knowledge expanding this quickly in the information age? Well, yes, and no. Human knowledge is of course expanding, but maybe not as quickly as the exchange of products and services for cold cash. E-commerce is skyrocketing along with the number of hosts, users, domains, and Websites. Trillions of dollars change hands over the internet in a calendar year these days. That’s nothing new, either. At Networld 98, industry analyst Nicholas Lippis announced that online commerce would generate USD1.5 trillion of US GDP by 2002.
With Broadband connections taking a serious role in so many American lives (Broadband use has already eclipsed 50% of the US on-line population), the access to human knowledge is expanding more than the actual knowledge itself. While service providers are the big winners in this marketplace of interconnected sites and search engines, garnering the lion’s share of on-line profits, new business sites are popping up every single day.
So which is it? Do you have to own a business for a while before you put a site on-line, or do you actually need to get a site up first these days? Business before pleasure, I say. I mean, the internet is a phenomenally successful part of our society now, but it is not the panacea. It’s not am automatic yellow brick road to success.
Some people might be able to get away with going into a business blind with just a Website and a product, especially considering there are sites now like eBay. Still, without people, nothing happends in the world today worth recording for history. You have to have infrastructure, employees, an office, and a plan beyond cyberspace if you want your business to really boom to the point where your site could then become vastly popular and help you retire young.
SpiderSplat's CEO Eric V. Melin has a favorite quote "A website doth not a company make," which is how he describes many of the businesses that flow across his desk. “I have 400 domain names” he says, “does that mean I have 400 companies?” So many “companies” are nothing more than someone buying a domain name in these post-dot-com days he says.
The world is composed of people. Melin truly believes that when people join together in a common purpose they can achieve anything. That’s why Spidersplat employees are drilled early on in the concept of human interaction with clients as a unique resource and hallmark of their business.
The internet is driven by machines. There are servers, data processors, mainframes, personal computers, and modems cranking at full speed day and night to keep you connected to the on-line world. Unfortunately, the machines don’t run themselves and aren’t always error free.
Sometimes there are bugs, and the term initially came from back in the day when computers were monstrous beasts. A moth or something got caught in one of the big fans in one of the first computers, causing the system to eventually fail. So the story goes. Now, someone had to go in and get that bug out. The computer couldn’t shake it out by itself. Today there is a swarm of bugs out there for humans to deal with. They come in all shapes and sizes, and like a plague of locusts they descend on the crops that are your personal computers. There are even bigger bugs that smash your windshield when you hit them on today’s information superhighway. They can fry your system for good or infiltrate a major site or search engine to do damage. They come in tiny, unsuspecting packages (Trojan Horse viruses) that explode once they get to their desired location, and they come in the form of pop-ups, spyware, and SPAM. These annoyances need people to manage them and keep them from infecting too many systems or servers.
The better side of the internet, on an uncorrupted system, can offer the user an amazing array of interesting choices to make once on-line. Is it inconceivable to picture a day when TV will be made obsolete by mind-boggling connection and page access speeds and multiple on-line channels that offer better programming than any boob tube? Not at all. The time will come. Sooner than that we will see the demise of the classic phone book. Maybe even the phone will follow. There are already free phone options on-line like Skype and paid broadband phone services like Vonage.
There is no question that the pace of technology can only improve the value of the internet. The passage of time will only bring more users into the marketplace and more sites to choose from. So, if you do put a company Website on-line early in the life of your business, chances are it will do well, eventually. As technology advances, it gets easier and easier to create your very own Website, whether you are a business or just an individual who wants to post pictures of yourself or your thoughts in a blog. Unfortunately, innovation and invention may not help much to market and move your site to the top of the Search Engine Results Pages. Ease of use is one thing, but the most effective concepts of marketing are human driven, not machine operated.
Melin is certainly right to say that a company is not made by its Web-site. People are involved in every part of the process. A good business truly needs the right people today, because as much as we all rely on machines every day of our lives, we often wish we could get away from them for a little while. Look at all those Corona commercials with the beach-lounging businessmen tossing their pagers into the water or ignoring incoming cell phone calls. Think of how fast you hang up when a computer system logs a telemarketing call to your home.
Spidersplat is all about people. “Humans do it better” is their official credo. The Boston-based company is as big on technology as any other SEO firm, if not bigger than most. Still, Eric Melin knows that real results come from person to person communication. No matter how technologically advanced this world becomes, it’s a pretty good bet that people will never stop talking to each other.
|
|
