Businesses ranging from small to large corporations are spending thousands to develop websites for e-commerce or just as a form of media to attract new businesses.
Development of an attractive and informative website can easily cost US$5000 and above. The need to own a website seems to be the top of most business' priority.
A strategic move to reach out to the local masses and also the global billions has caused many to rethink what websites can do for their businesses.
The myth of owning a website
One strategic thought that business owners or strategic decision makers have is: "Have a website, then people will know us and new businesses will come".
This is definitely a hopeful thought, but it is definitely a myth.
Many website owners are disillusioned after having invested thousands of dollars to develop their corporate websites.
The following may describe your website:
Your website is not found at all on Google and Yahoo!
No one seems to find your site and therefore no one buys anything from you.
No one is asking you to send a quotation or proposal for your services or products featured on the site.
You have hardly any visitor to your website.
Sadly, the only visitors to your website will be those business partners who are associated with you.
To increase the number of people visiting your website, you distribute brochures and business cards at meetings, train stations and in mail boxes. However, this will reach only a selected group of people within your country.
Purpose of website
The purpose of having a website is definitely to let potential business partners and consumers locate you on the Internet.
When we talk about the potential, we are thinking about local, regional and even global.
Information from the Singapore Department of Statistics (http://www.singstat.gov.sg/) shows that Singapore has about 2.4 million on the Internet.
According to Internet World Stats (http://www.internetworldstats.com/), there are about 1.17 billion (as of June 2007) people worldwide who use the Internet.
In Asia alone, there are close to 440 million users, with China, Japan and India being the top three respectively. This is just over 30% of the world's Internet population and it is definitely increasing in Asia alone. A large market potential is before us when we consider the Internet and websites.
Competition on the Internet
In July 2007, the Netcraft Web Server Survey (http://www.netcraft.com) found 125,626,329 sites, an increase of 3.62 million sites from the June 2007 survey. However, there are probably just over 50 million active sites, with billions of web pages uploaded on the Internet.
In Singapore, statistics from SGNIC shows that there are about 82,000 ".sg" websites registered, which is an increase of over 100% from year 2004, in just over three years.
Your website is but one of many millions on the Internet. There are also thousands of others dealing in your products and services. The competition is definitely out there.
Websites compete to be ranked by major search engines for their popular keywords or key-phrases. For a specific keyword or phrase, would your company be found and ranked by the search engines for free?
With the right choice of popular keywords (such as training, development, spa, massage, consultancy, health) or key-phrases (such as dog behaviour school, SEO training in Singapore, aesthetic clinic in Singapore, Singapore CMS web design), strategies can be applied to improve your website's ranking.
Introducing search engine optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is often overlooked when designing a website.
SEO is a strategy incorporated into web designs by SEO consultants and experts. When this strategy is skillfully applied, it helps a website to be ranked well among the top few pages, for popular keywords or phrases you want the site to be found for.
A website that is SEO-friendly will attract new leads and also targeted leads who are looking to address some specific concerns. Such leads, if managed well, will be translated into revenue for a company.
SEO strategy is not just about keywords or phrases, which are also of basic importance.
There are various components in this strategy, which are to be done either on-page or off-page. This will help determine how the search engines find and rank your website. This will be elaborated further in future articles.
It is definitely a fact to say that a website equals more new businesses.
However, your website has to be SEO-friendly to attract search engine "spiders" to crawl to your site, evaluate and then rank your website well among popular keywords searched.
This is when business starts to improve through the Internet.
Mr Jolly Tan is an SEO consultant of Finggle Pte Ltd. Finggle Pte Ltd (http://www.finggle.com), an SEO training company based in Singapore, offers training in search engine optimisation and search engine marketing to marketing professionals, IT specialists and website owners to help improve website search engine ranking and visibility.
