In a world of e-revolution, where electronic store fronts are taking a competitive marketing approach, your organic internet search placement is becoming crucial for success. A normal query on a search engine often turns up hundreds if not thousands of matching web pages and only ten matches are displayed on the first page — are you in the top ten?

If you’re not in position one on the first page, third or fourth can be just as beneficial. Of course the higher your site is positioned, the higher its exposure and opportunities for capturing visits from engaged customers. Top ranking gets an estimated 56% of the clicks from searches. Second and third place get about 14% and 12% respectively. It pays to be number one.

As we all know, there is no Search Engine Optimization (SEO) formula for placement, just methods to follow to beat out your competition and obtain higher rankings.

Steps to Success in Search Engines

There are many steps to getting top placement online. 

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Consider the time and dedication NASA puts toward preparing the space shuttle for its next mission. Months of research, planning, and prep to get all the details in place for a flawless launch. It’s launch day and the countdown is on…5…4…3…2..LIFTOFF!

You can hear the hi-five’s sparking all around the control center. Then the director announces over the loud speaker, “Okay everyone, great job…have a good night!”

Say what? 
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Proper visual and structural design is a crucial step in building a site that won’t kill you.

Design gets a bad rap sometimes. It’s expensive, time consuming, not needed—designers create answers that nobody wants to problems that don’t exist…yikes!

We’ve talked with many companies over the years. They’ve ranged from shoestring startups to some big names. No matter what size of company it is, many times there is someone there unwilling to make the investment on design and usability. The main complaint is that the payoff in those areas are not worth the investment.

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As acclimated consumers of the information age, we’ve come a long way from understanding how the blips and lights of the modern personal computer work. We have migrated into an all-encompassing online social grid that seeks to craft the new manner by which we consume, experience, and react to web content. Knowing this about the web, however, is not enough to fill the minds and wallets of those organizations who seek profits today and tomorrow – it takes a larger leap of faith. The key to success for any organization, to sustain a promising future in this post-modern territory, is to manage their website for optimal ROI. How, you may be asking?

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You’ve seen it before, the common day-to-day unfolding of most organizations. They start somewhere between a second serving of coffee and a verbal rehash of yesterday’s news. Between the foreseeable dehydration and irrelevant debate, few decisions are made about the state of their web presence. What is far more daunting is that when the website is considered a topic of discussion, nothing profound or progressive pushes the rhetoric further than the aesthetic of the website.

Granted, to those involved in filling a 9 to 5 block, it may seem like time well spent picking pretty colors and finding more reasons for the website to “Pop!”. Unfortunately, these sorts of discussions are not sufficient in understanding the impact of an organizations website. Those in charge of making big decisions must come to terms with the idea that their website is an investment and should be cared for with the same amount of discipline. To those in the know, such accusations may come off as unsound or irrelevant due to the adoption rate of the internet. However, the affects of the internet along with simply having a website do not guarantee results.

I challenge you to examine your next company meeting and see if John-Doe from marketing is determine to send out his polished mailers or Jane from sales is set on buying more leads. If the latter describes your organization’s current state of investment, loosely, then I invite you to read on. On the other hand, if you’re fortunate and your company’s adoption characteristic in conversions is what Geoffrey Moore describes as pre-chasm(early adopters and or visionaries) in his book “Crossing the Chasm”, then we commend you and invite you to read for leisure. For those of us in the early majority, let me focus on the opportunity of converting a return on investment through the explorations in Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus’ book “Web Design for ROI.” (more…)