Can potential new customers really find your company andproducts on the web?

Imagine that you are one of your own target customers, andthat you haven't heard of your company yet. You decide to search the web tolook for companies that provide the products or services that your companyoffers.

Think of one short phrase that you would type into a searchengine to find your company (not your company name). Now, using this samephrase, go see if you can find your company in the major search engines. Makesure you try each of the most popular search engines, as ranked by the usagestatistics:

        Google                                    32%

        Yahoo                                      25%

        AOL (including Netscape)   19%

        MSN                                         15%

        Others                                        9%

Now go to each of these sites and type in "MarketingConsultant Silicon Valley" and see if you find The 280 Group.

Chances are you didn't find your company (unless you arealready incredibly well known in a specific category), and that you did findthe 280 Group.

I'm constantly amazed by the number of companies that dolittle or nothing to optimize their positioning and placement in searchengines. They spend hours agonizing over content and design, and thousands ofdollars implementing and building their sites, yet they never benefit becausenew customers don't find them.

Now consider this. By some estimates GOOGLE POWERS ANESTIMATED 76% OF THE SEARCHES ON THE WEB (largely because they provide resultsto AOL and Yahoo).

Your business may not be one that needs new customersfinding you on their own, but I'm betting that's not the case. If you want toremedy this situation, you'll have to embark on a search engine optimizationcampaign for your site.

There are many factors to consider when optimizing yoursite. Here are just a few:

• Website architecture and underlying technologies used to build your site
• Content used and how it is structured
• Keywords you believe prospects will use
• Popularity and ranking of your site (calculated by Google)
• Making your site friendly to website crawlers
• Ensuring you don't make any fatal mistakes that will disqualify your site from being ranked highly.

Search engine optimization takes a lot of time, effort andexpertise. Whether you decide to build your own in-house group to manage it, orto bring in a company like the 280 Group, make sure you spend the time to do itright. If you do you'll get the full benefits from your website, increase yourtraffic and capture new customers.