Do You Really Need a Website?

In today’s world, every business MUST have a web presence.  It is a fact that people searching for a particular product or service in their local marketplace, will search the internet first.  The Google search has most certainly replaced the telephone directory.  So having said that, you would think that if you don’t have a nice shiny website, you are doomed.

Not necessarily so.  Note I said every business MUST have a web presence.  I did not say they must have a website.

Not having a website, or not having a nice shiny one, should not prevent you from harnessing the power of this virtual world.  We can get our clients top placements in the major search engines even if they have no website, or a poorly optimized site.  Let’s say for example, that you had your nephew build you a website and it looks good, but its either buried somewhere below the third page on the search results, or it’s not showing up at all.  Another scenerio may be that you just plain don’t have a site.  No problem!

What we do is create highly optimized pages (not to be confused with a website), and we drive traffic to those pages using various techniques including video and article production.  We construct a “web” of backlinks to these pages.  For clients whose nephew created them a fancy unoptimized, unranked site, the page that gets ranked will link to their fancy website.  For those without a fancy site, our page will provide personalized content such as logo, images, address, telephone number, google map with directions, list of products and services etc.  So while it’s not a website, it can still generate heaps of new business for your business.

Caution: Do not start building your own website until you read this.  Knee jerk reactions cost time and money.  There are things you should consider before purchasing a site builder!

If You Build It, They Will Come…

Remember the movie “Field of Dreams”?

When it comes to website traffic, you are truly dreaming if you think that building the website is the key to gaining web traffic.  Naturally, without a website, there is no hope (that’s not entirely true either*) of being found online, but it takes far more than a fancy website to get visitors.

There are some very good website building programs on the internet.  My personal favorite is SiteBuildIt, but there are others that are almost as good.  With SBI, you can build your own website, and although they say you don’t need any knowledge, trust me when I tell you that there will be a learning curve.  There is no magic button, but for the business owner with the time, patience and desire to learn, SBI is one of the best do it yourself solutions you’ll find.

The actual site building process is the easy part.  It’s the optimization that is the real challenge.  Again, SBI provides some SEO (search engine optimization) techniques, especially with regard to on page SEO.  On page SEO is just a fancy term for making sure you have the right code inserted in the source of your site so that the search engines can find your site.  Again, that is just a very small piece of the puzzle.

Search engines, like Google, Yahoo and Bing use what we refer to as algorithms to index websites submitted for inclusion in their index.  You can click on the word to get the wikipedia definition.  In short, the Search Engine Algorithms are the “rules” for getting a site ranked or even included at all in an index.  Those rules change frequently.  So if you are planning to do it yourself, keeping up with the changes is a must.  What is acceptable today could get you removed tomorrow.  All your hard work (and there is some hard work involved) can be gone in the wink of an eye.

Generally speaking, if you are not an “internet guy”, my recommendation is that you should go ahead and build your own site, if you like a challenge and are motivated.  But unless you are seriously motivated, have lots of extra time and aren’ t in a hurry to get your site to the top of the search engines, you should consider getting an expert to market your new site for you.

*Read my short article on why you do not need a website to get top rank.