A CORPORATE WEBSITE IS A LONG TERM PROJECT.

There are no guarantees, no quick fixes and no glib answers, but there are lots of things that can be done to attract success.  Some of the following items apply to retail based sites, some to commercial/industrial and some to both.  Note – these items are not in order of importance.

Everyone who visits a site is a ‘pre-qualified’ potential client, their very presence confirms an interest in the product or service.  So the emphasis should be on providing content, content, content - not sales and marketing hype.  They are simply looking for information!

The site should be kept fresh – update the content regularly and make it worth while for visitors to come back or recommend the site to others.  UK WebWise can maintain a ‘Last Update’ value on home pages to show that the site is not dormant.

Spread the word - tell employees, friends, colleagues, customers – everyone, that the site exists.  This pays real dividends and gets everyone involved with the site into the swing of promoting it.   If the only accolade that a site deserves is that of ‘best kept secret’, the opportunity has been lost.

Make the most of press releases – milk the media.  Some companies are brilliant at getting endless, on-going coverage by wrapping a commercial message within news items and positive announcements.   Trade and free publications are particularly open to this kind of approach.

Run competitions.  Retail outlets are ideally placed to gain massive publicity by offering small prizes in order to attract people to their site – possibly to extract some prize-winning item of data.   Now if the offer can be pitched to help a local paper or radio station promote themselves at the same time, you have a winner.  Few people realise just how hard it is for local stations and publications to find news items – so keep bombarding them and you will win through.

Advertise – note how many TV adverts finish with ‘www…’, note the huge ads in papers and magazines.   Some search engines prioritise their recommendations on the basis of how popular a site is, so initial expenditure on advertising can stimulate a burst of activity and get the site registered near the top of the search engine rankings.

Include details about the site on all company letterheads, invoices, compliment slips and business cards – never let an opportunity slip by.

The site should be registered with as many search engines and directories as possible – otherwise the term ‘needle in a haystack’ truly applies.  Some search engines only handle certain categories of product/service - there is nothing you can do if you fall outside their remit, and indeed, given their specific audience, neither would you want to.

Some search engines are domain dependent, this could well mean that unless your domain name reflects that country of origin (www.xxx.fr for France) the engine would not record your entry.  Where it would be beneficial to have good coverage in, say French, German, Spanish and Japanese speaking directories;  is technically possible to register multiple domain names to represent each of those areas.  They would then be submitted to the regional search engines, but have all contact ‘forwarded’ to the main website – where a page in their national lingo would welcome them.  This of course adds to the costs involved.

Another very important reason for doing so would be to PROTECT each individual domain name – in other words – prevent someone else from registering your trading style within their region.  Where serious pennies have been spent (or will be spent) creating brand awareness, it makes sense to seek protection in this manner.  In some instances people may want to register your name for unscrupulous purposes, in others it could be a matter of innocent duplication with another trading purpose in mind.  For instance, ‘www.bbc.co.fr’ could quite legitimately be the Bridget Bardot Club in France, yet this could put an end to the British Broadcasting Corporation’s aspirations to dominate Europe!

A cheaper solution to registering multiple domain names for each region could be to have special pages created in each specific language.  These would be typically accessed via Flag Images on the home page.  These could be used to fool the regional search engines into accepting the entry and to make the foreign visitors feel at home.  Fortunately English is far and away the most dominant language on the web and the vast majority of technically minded foreigners do read and speak English - so once they have found the site and been welcomed, they can usually make good use of it.  However, it is not simply a matter of translating the text on each home page, for the all importance text within the software programming of the page must also be amended.

If a domain name could be misspelt, it makes sense to create secondary domain names to ‘capture’ such traffic and ‘forward’ it to the correct site.  For instance, Eazy Rizer bed manufacturers could have eazyrizer.co.uk AND easyriser.co.uk (and possibly eazyriser.co.uk and easyrizer.co.uk).  Web users can be notoriously impatient and rarely acknowledge that failure to connect could be their fault!

Equally, plural variations can ensure that poor memory does not exclude potential clients from accessing the site, again, smithcarauction.co.uk could usefully be supplemented by smithscarauction.co.uk, smithscarauctions.co.uk and smithcarauctions.co.uk and would lessen the chance of loosing custom.

Finally, many users rely upon ‘trial and error’, rather than trawling through search engines to determine a company’s web address, so variations of domain names that users are likely to try ‘out of the blue’ can trap the impatient, one-try merchants.

Great care should be taken to determine a precise description of the business, which will be used by search engines to allow people to decide whether the site in question meets their needs.  A maximum of 200 characters long, this should instantly portray what the company and their product/service are about.  This description will often be presented along with several optional websites for users to choose from.

Lists of words and phrases that potential customers might use to locate the website within a search must be compiled.   Phrases are particularly powerful and should take into account plural variations.  This must be done from the point of view of potential customers - not those closely connected with the industry.  Where individual pages deal with specific products or issues, words and phrases should be drawn up specifically for them.   It is crucial that the maximum number of keywords/phrases should be listed and then put in order of priority.  No single task is more important than this!

Market research should be conducted to determine the most popular and well-regarded websites serving a similar purpose.  These are useful from a programming aspect to find out the keywords that successful sites use within the same industry and also to provide design ideas and concepts for the client to consider.

Search engines should be used to locate the competition – then the first five sites to appear should be recorded – along with the keywords used to find them.

Good software programming is vital – websites are like icebergs, the most important part is out of sight.

As with life in general, the more you put in – the more you get back!