If your website receives no visitors it serves no useful purpose. Search Engines are by far the most important.
You must ensure that, when someone types some words into a search engine to find possible suppliers or informants, your site comes high up on the list of results. If it does not, you have just lost a potential customer to a competitor.
So the first step is to analyse which key phrases are most likely to be used by your customers – and which give you the best chance of achieving a top ranking. For a new site, some subjective assessment is required, but later you will have actual results on which to base refinements.
You may have heard the term ’search engine optimisation’; this is the same as ‘website optimisation’ but less accurate. What you have to do is adapt your site to the requirements of the search engines. Not the other way round!
Most Used Sources
for Web Addresses
Search Engine
57%
E-mail Messages
38%
Web Sites
35%
Word of Mouth
28%
Magazine Ads
25%
TV Commercials
14%
Periodical Article
11%
Vendor Catalogs
11%
Newspaper Ads
9%
Banner Ads
7%
Radio Ads
2%
Mail Ads
2%
Source: Forrester Research
January 1999