Would you like to prevent Internet users from visiting your
website? You may feel that you're asked a silly question. But
then think about why so many investors are silently watching how
their web projects are doomed to invisibility from the outset
despite nobody wants to conceal his or her own website from the
public.
History
In the Internet's Middle Ages - eight to ten years back,
everything related to the Web was extremely expensive, from
Internet access to web design and programming to hosting, and
creative folks built their first websites mostly from a
perspective of future opportunities. The then start-ups tried to
attract their audiences by interesting information and colorful
pictures in hopes that the visitors will find their web pages
somehow, through ads or otherwise, and remember the useful
Internet address (URL) or add it to favorites in order to come
back again and again.
But times have changed. Now, with almost forty million of active
domains and twenty million of websites, the archaic approach to
entering any online market doesn't work. It's no longer enough
to have nice graphics and useful information on web pages and
drive some additional traffic to a site via banner ads. To be
visible, websites have to compete fiercely for search traffic.
Those players on the Web who don't understand new harsh
realities are just losing their money and online niches to
rivals.
Power of Search
Today's Internet users aren't inclined to compile lists of
useful web addresses and then copy and paste or type in domain
names like "www.your-greatest-website.com." Of course, an
average web surfer has a number of pages bookmarked in the
browser, but when it comes to searching the Web for information,
products or services, the user goes to a search site and type
relevant words or phrases in a search box. What would you do if
you needed, for example, a vacuum cleaner or the latest news on
a Cabinet reshuffle in Myanmar? Yes, you visit your favorite
search site and type in your key search terms there, say,
"vacuum cleaner" or "cabinet reshuffle myanmar." The search site
will display you its search result page or pages with many links
to the information you need. It's simple and effective.
The search sites have become an integrated part of the overall
Internet industry and can be classified into two major groups:
search engines and directories. The search engines use special
programs; so-called spiders or crawlers travel the web, scan web
pages and include them in search engine databases. Contrary to
the search engines that store information about web pages, the
Internet directories are supported manually by human editors,
have no automated programs and list websites by categories.
Google, MSN, AltaVista, AOL and AlltheWeb are the most popular
search engines on a global scale. Yahoo! and DMOZ (ODP) are
particularly noteworthy among global directories. Yandex and
Rambler - each has a search engine and a directory - have
actually captured a search market in Russia and other CIS
countries despite they now face tough competition from Google.
There are local search sites at the deeper regional level as
well. Ukraine, for example, has UaPortal.com.ua and Bigmir.net
(directories), and META.ua and Sova.com.ua (search engines) that
are besieged by competition from the likes of Google, Yandex and
Rambler.
Whatever marketing researches you do, whatever sophisticated web
design and programming technologies you apply and whatever great
website you launch, your web project will always remain hidden
from your target audiences unless your web pages get into search
engine databases and are listed among the first 30 search
results. Every online business comes to this conclusion sooner
or later. Sometimes it happens too late when designers has
already sucked in all website budget and sacrificed potential
search traffic for expensive and unnecessary graphics or codes.
Lost in Design
Did you ever happen to talk a web project over with a design
studio? Seasoned website owners know there are five points which
you will be reverted to, no matter what goals you actually wish
to get. These sacred cows are "logo, programming language,
colors, graphics and site structure." When you ask designers
about visibility of a website to your target audiences, its
projected positions on the search engine result pages and
whether their design concept improves or worsens those
positions, you always hear something like "... our team
..creative approach ...newest technologies ...clear design ...
harmonizing colors" and so on which return you to the above five
dogmas. If you aren't strong enough to resist the spell they
used to cast over a client, you'll became addicted to graphics
and forget about your primary objectives - visibility to
Internet users and high rankings in search engines. Among those
who fall into the trap of misunderstanding their own goals are
not only newbies, but also experienced folks whose websites have
plummeted down in search engines from Top10 to invisibility
since they unreasonably agreed to "upgrade" their "obsolete"
content-rich recourses to splash pages and inner pages heavy on
flash animation and programming codes.
Now it's time to look at how it works. Oh, sorry, how it doesn't
work.
Tolerance to Invisibility
There are top needs such as job, health, foodstuffs, car, etc.
that millions of citizens depends on in their everyday life, be
it in Kiev, Moscow or New York City. Also, we know there are a
lot of websites that offer relevant products and services via
the Internet, especially in large cities. The point, however, is
how reachable and effective the service and product providers
are online. To learn whether online resources meet the needs of
an average consumer in different cities, we can describe some of
the most likely queries with keywords or phrases and type the
keywords in a search box of search engines.
For example, let's take Google.com and Google.com.ua that can
provide powerful search on New York City and Kiev. If you type
"new york city jobs" or "jobs in kiev" (the latter in Russian or
Ukrainian, of course) in the search box and hit the Enter,
you'll get millions of search results on New York and more than
hundred thousand results on Kiev, with the first 30 relevant to
the search query in both cases. It's OK; website owners in the
recruitment industry do pay attention to their online visibility
and traffic to their sites in many countries worldwide. When
you're searching for "online food shopping," you can find a lot
of online stores in New York, but the Kiev Top 30 results
include no direct links to the websites that sell foodstuffs -
just free classifieds and links to listings at the Internet
directories. It's not bad for the New York shoppers who can
choose among one and a half million search results on
foodstuffs. But when it comes to other industries that cannot
show so many results, say, dentistry, the Kiev and the New York
web resources demonstrate almost the same trends; a majority of
the dentistry sites have no direct links from Google's search
result pages and are searchable only through classifieds and
listings at directories, if any. Many of them have slow-loading
pages unfriendly to both search engine spiders and Internet
users. What did the website owners think about, when they
invested in those packages of pictures and programming codes
that could never get even a click in the shadows of the
competitors? They didn't think. They just listened to their web
design contractors.
Here is a classic example. The Kiev web developers who provide
outsourcing services say that their best clients are among US
small businesses and Ukrainian large companies. Why? Because
there is no need to follow rigid requirements in terms of
website promotion and visibility, and a contractor may expect a
higher fee-to-time ratio. The US clients think an easy
availability of broadband services within their country gives
them a reason to ignore some common requirements and to believe
that huge pictures and codes could also be cool for the dial-up
and international users. On the other hand, the Ukrainian key
clients often neglect an online visibility issue, as they
believe their brand names are widely known both regionally and
globally. That's why they trust their contractors absolutely and
never draw up the specifications themselves.
The vast majority of website owners around the globe still don't
bother imposing limits on graphics and programming codes and
don't care about website specifications, especially visibility
issues such as keyword and competitor analysis, web page
structure, web promotion
(http://azurel10n.com/web-promotion-faq.htm), etc. You can
launch your web project that way too, but think about what
you'll really get: a functional site with tens of thousands of
monthly hits or an unreachable online presentation in an
Internet-compatible format?
About the author:
Vyacheslav Melnik is the founder and owner of AzureL10n
(http://azurel10n.com/), a website specializing in web
localization, copywriting and search engine optimization for
Runet and Uanet, the Russian and Ukrainian portions of the
Internet.
