Beyond an e-brochure: getting business from your web site

A web site is an essential marketing tool of a business. These days, especially in the Seattle area, people will check out your web site before doing business with you. The work you do with a graphic designer like Peter Mckinnon can have a big impact when someone decides whether you're the right fit for what they're looking to buy.

Just having a web site, however, does nothing to get customers beating down your doors. People need to find your web site somehow, amidst the millions of other web sites out there. For small, local businesses, they don't find your web site online--they find it from your business card, a sign on your car, word-of-mouth, or all the rest of the traditional ways people market their business.

If you want your web site to actually generate business for you, recognize that it's going to take a substantial investment in your time, more than anything else. The critical ingredient in getting your site noticed by search engines is content. The more, the better--especially if it's interesting, relevant, and unique. Having new, original content on your site helps it in two ways:

1. It's more raw material for Google and the other search engines to index. Sheer quantity helps.
2. If you're a decent writer, and write something useful, people will return to your site to see what you write next, and some will link to your pages.

Google is basically a popularity contest: it places the highest value on pages with the most links coming from other sites. Create a page that people want to read, and eventually it will boost your rank on Google. Create a bunch of pages, and soon you'll be at the top of the search engines, and start to get business over the Internet.

You can jump-start online marketing by buying advertising. Pay-per-click ads work, and don't cost all that much. But nothing beats the organic results you get by growing your site with regular additions of new content. 

If you need a system to make it easy to add stories to your site on a regular basis, that's where Freelock Computing can help. We work extensively with Joomla, MediaWiki, Word Press, and Serendipity, different systems that make it simple for you to manage your own content without needing a technical background. We regularly deploy, customize, host, and provide training for these systems. Let us know if we can help!