How To Start an Internet Business – The First Step

The vast majority of web sites are destined to fail before they are even built. Why? Because people building sites almost always put the cart before the horse. Actually, most don’t even include the horse.

Evolution of Your Site

New sites follow a typical evolutionary process.

1. The first stage involves slaving over the design of the site to get just the right look;

2. The second stage is the publication of the site;

3. Third comes the first thought about how to get traffic to the site;

4. Fourth, the discovery of pay-per-click options;

5. Fifth, the pursuit of PPC campaigns and realization of sales!;

6. Sixth, the “misery stage”, occurs with the realization that sales are being made at a loss!;

7. Frustration, frustration, frustration;

8. The “extinction stage” - With profitability seeming impossible, the PPC campaigns are closed and the site just sits there.

Does any of this sound familiar? You need not suffer this evolutionary extinction! Taking one step before you build a site can save you a lot of wasted time and money.

If You Build It, Will They Come?

The first step to developing a successful web site is keyword analysis. Keywords are the anchors of each page of your site, a collective summary of your products and services.

The first step to developing an online business is to identify whether there is sufficient traffic for your business product or service. Let’s look at a very simple example.

If your are selling boating products, each page of your site should incorporate boating-related keyword phrases. You must analyze whether there is a sufficient number of searches each month to make your boating site a viable entity. A free method for doing this is to use the Overture inventory tool:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

In our example, we would do a search for “boating” to see how many searches there are for the keyword as well as other boating-related keyword phrases. A quick search shows there were over 100,000 searches for “boating” and over 4,000 searches for “boating supply” in March 2005. These numbers suggest that there clearly is enough traffic to build a site selling boating products.

Alternatively, assume that we want to build a site promoting our hiking guide service in Nevada. If we do a search for “Nevada hiking” using the Overture inventory tool, we find that there are only 100 or so searches a month. Should we go ahead and build the site? Probably not. There simply isn’t enough interest to justify spending the time and money.

Unfortunately, we often talk with site owners that have spent significant amounts of money building a site only to find that there is little interest in their product or service. By performing keyword analysis, you can determine whether a site should be built before you spend the time, energy and money on it. There is little reason to build a site that has no chance of success.

Keywords: The Basic Unit Of E-Commerce.

Traffic is the key right? The more targeted the traffic the better right? And how do you get traffic? Well the simple answer is that you need to have high search engine rankings but that is such a general and unhelpful answer. So I am going to try and give you a better idea of the inner workings of a search engine ranking including the most fundamental and obvious and therefore most underestimated factors, namely keywords.

Keywords are just that key words that people type into the blank for the search engine that describe what they are interested in finding out about. Basically the search engine tries to match the keyword with the content of millions of different web pages that it crawls through and ranks in order from most applicable to least the pages whose content has any thing to do with the keyword.

Now the search engine has different criteria that it weights in its evaluation of the relatedness of a web page to specific keywords. Unfortunately for those interested in high rankings these criteria are for the search engines to know and for us in the internet marketing field to find out. In other words they are unspoken. That isn't to say however that we don't know anything about them but it is to say that we have only found out about them through trial and error testing--we find out what works and stick with it.

There is another problem with this though. That is that the search engine, in order to give all pages a chance and to keep the content on the internet fresh are always changing their criteria and trying to improve their search results as far as relevancy is concerned. So the testing is always going on and those who are good at seeing the trends and predicting changes are able to stay successful in their field. One must remember though that despite all of these changes, there is nothing changing the way a customer searches for his interests on the internet.

So before you worry about all the complicated criteria you must target your content to the appropriate keywords. There are many tools that help you to research keywords, and many are free. Basically you are looking for keywords that are searched for the most that describe your product or the market your product is included in well enough that people who come to your page through that search will agree that you have what they were looking for. This is the essence of "targeted" traffic. Think about it for a minute, you can have all the traffic in the world come to your page but you will only get sales from those that are in need of what you have to offer. It only makes sense then to bring those people to your site.

How To Rank Well In The Search Engines And Get Website Traffic

It is well worth your time to learn and apply a few basics to increase your web site's search engine rankings and consequently the amount of traffic to your website. These techniques are commonly referred to as SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.

Create a site with unique, valuable content, products or services.

Place primary and secondary keywords within the first 25 words in your page content and spread them evenly throughout the document.

Research and use the right keywords or key phrases to attract the type of customer that you wish to target.

Use your keywords in your site's Title, META tags, Headers, etc.

Keep your site design simple so that your customers can navigate easily between web pages, find what they want and purchase your products and services.

Submit your web pages to the search engines and directories. This means every web page, not just the home page. Hire someone to do this for you if necessary. For best results, perform manual submission. Don't use an automated submission service.

Keep track of changes in search engine algorithms and processes and accordingly modify your web pages so your search engine ranking remains high. Use online tools and utilities to keep track of how your website is doing.

Keep an eye on your competitors and the top ranked websites to see what they are doing in respect to design, navigation, content, keywords, etc.

Use reports and logs from your web hosting company to see where your traffic is coming from. Analyze your visitor location and how they found your website, whether from search engines or links from other sites, and the keywords they used to find you.

Make your customer visit easy and give them as many ways to remember you as you can in the form of newsletters, free reports, reduction coupons, etc.

Demonstrate your industry and product or service expertise by writing and submitting articles for your website or for article banks so you are perceived as an expert in your field.

When selling products online, use simple payment and shipment methods to make your customer’s experience fast and easy.

When not sure, hire professionals. Paying their fees makes more sense than spending your money on a website which no one visits.

Don’t view your website as a static brochure. Treat it as a dynamic, ever-changing sales tool and location. The search engines like to see change and growth in your web pages and will reward you with better rankings.