Beacon Journal | 09/06/2004 | Time to hire `hit man'

Beacon Journal | 09/06/2004 | Time to hire `hit man'

Time to hire `hit man'

Getting hits from search engines can reap profits

By Erika D. Smith

Beacon Journal staff writer


S YOUR COMPANY'S Web site the proverbial tree? (You know, falling in the woods and nobody's there to hear it.)

If it's not designed to attract attention from search engines, then it is. And you can forget about yelling ``timber'' when your online sales fall as a result.

``A lot of small or local businesses tend to look at search engines like the Yellow Pages. That's not accurate,'' said Chris Sherman, editor of the industry newsletter SearchDay. ``The Yellow Pages are local. If people are looking for you, they'll find you. Search engines are looking at billions of pages on the Web.''

If Google or Yahoo can't see your company's Web site, most customers can't either. And that means you won't see much profit from it -- no matter how many fancy, flashy features you add.

Fifty-five percent of all online purchases begin with a search engine, but 93 percent of customers don't look past the first two pages of the results, according to the Internet research firm Jupiter Media Matrix.

So, the key to successful e-commerce is not only to design a Web site for search engines to notice, but to optimize it so it ranks highly.



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