Ensuring Your Online Business’ Success

By Stoney deGeyter

When starting or running a business online there are four major areas of utmost importance, where quality trumps just about all other factors. For this article, I will provide a brief overview of the importance of the first three and expound further on the fourth.

Internet Service Provider (ISP): Your inability to get on the internet won’t effect your customers’ interaction with your website, but it will effect your ability to update your site quickly and efficiently. It’s important that you have a fast and reliable provider.

Web Hosting: Many consider web hosting as just another utility expense, however hosting your business site with a less than reliable company can harm your business significantly. You want to make sure that your website is available and able to be downloaded quickly on visitor machines, and make sure that business emails are delivered correctly.

Web Design: A professional looking and correctly operating site can go a long way to instill trust with your visitors and giving them a great user experience. Poor or improperly functioning websites can cause user dissatisfaction and defection.

Search Engine Marketing: Building a website is a great first step for your business, but you need to ensure that your business site gets noticed and positioned on the major search engines. This process is called search engine marketing or optimization (SEM or SEO). Without the ability to drive traffic to your site, the best site on the best server using the best ISP will be a vacant site.

Optimizing your site for top search engine placement can be done in-house (by you or an employee) or can be contracted out to a firm that provides professional search engine optimization services. Many feel they can save money by doing it all themselves, but often soon find that the amount of time, energy and education involved costs far more than simply hiring a consulting firm to do it for them.

When looking for a search engine marketing firm, you want to choose wisely. There are many “companies” out there that really know no more about search engine optimization than you do but they are more than willing to take your money for their limited experience or knowledge. SEO has been around for about ten years now so you can easily find a firm that has considerable success stories under their belt.

With any optimization campaign, you want to ensure your SEO company knows more than just how to get top rankings, but one that can also help you focus your site’s marketing efforts. All the traffic in the world won’t do you any good if your SEO compromises your ability to sell, in exchange for visibility.

Written by Stoney deGeyter for Pole Position Marketing

This article was posted on February 25, 2006