GETTING YOUR WEBSITE SEEN

Just as with a beautiful well-designed full-color sales brochure, your Website must be seen by the right prospects to be effective.

And, in addition to designing the site to get results once a prospect is there, a number of steps should be considered to make sure that those prospects with a genuine interest in your products or services actually find your location.

Here is a list of steps which can enhance the productivity of your Website:

1. Add your Web address to your letterheads, business cards and other stationery.

2. Add your Web address to all of your sales literature, advertisements...every promotion piece you produce. Place ads on other related sites with links to your pages.

3. Contact appropriate vendors, manufacturers which you may represent, and others who could link their site to yours. It might even be appropriate to reciprocate with a link to their sites as long as it didn't lead prospects to a competitor. There are ways to design your pages so that when a visitor to your site links to another site, there is an easy return to your pages.

4. Prepare a special letter, announcement, postcard or direct mail piece to tell prospects about your Web location and why they should be interested in viewing it. Including a few pages of "reference" material in your Website is often a good idea. It provides a tangible reason to ask people to visit the site in order to see these special pages. It's also a reason some people will return to your site.

5. Have your Web site submitted to all of the leading search engines...Google, Yahoo, MSN, Excite, WebCrawler, Go/Infoseek, AltaVista, Lycos, Snap, Look Smart, Hot Bot, Go, etc. There are thousands of them in all, and more being developed all the time. A dozen or two could be important to the success of your Web site. A few use special programs to search the internet, look at all of the different sites, and index the information presented. Many do nothing. And even those that do, don't always pick up the key words that make locating your site effective. Waiting for those "spiders" to search the Web can often take months.

It is also advisable to update these announcements, and to repeat them periodically to keep your Web site listing closer to the top of the results the search engine produces.

A variety of submissions, with a different emphasis, is also recommended when your company offers more than one distinct service. Possibly you have both retail and industrial products, or your company has specialty services for certain industry segments. Maybe you offer a top-of-the-line top-of-the-price line of products, plus a budget quality line for a different group of prospects.

We have the special capability to send this information over the internet in the form the various search engines will use. The cost is modest and can dramatically improve traffic to your site.

6. Publicity releases should be sent to your industry trade publications. Again, incorporating reference material into your site enhances the interest of these publications to run your announcement. Preparing a release, and possibly including a photo, is not expensive and can be very effective.