Do you remember when fax machines first appeared? It was leading edge stuff and only big business could afford it. Eventually, improvements in mass electronics manufacturing made fax machines more affordable. Small enterprises that wanted to look like big business thought a fax machine was well worth the investment. Not only that, the fax machine actually made work flow more efficient. Over time, fax machines became so common, if you didn't have a separate fax number on your business card, your customers wondered why.

The same is true about web sites. Years ago they were a novelty and you were led to believe you needed a high priced computer geek to put one up for you. Times have changed. Powerful software has made creating a web site easier and more economical. Now, just about everyone who wants to look like a big business has a presence on the web. And if you don't, people wonder why. One thing you don't want, is your customers wondering why you're not keeping up with the times. If you're in business, you should definitely have a web site!

The web is most likely one of the greatest mass marketing innovations of the century since Gutenberg introduced printing. No other medium provides more flexibility economy, and market exposure than the worldwide web.

If you have experience with brochures or catalogs, you know the limitations on quantities, color, amount of pages and page size. And, as they say, it may as well be written in stone. If you discover an error after the print run, there's nothing you can do except reprint the entire job. Not so with the web. You can create as many pages as you can afford, and you get full color at no additional cost. If you discover an error, no problem, it's easily fixed. Want to change a page or even one item on a page? Easy as pie. But here's the most amazing part about the web, the entire world can view your site! Try that with a brochure or catalog.

Everything has a downside and the web is not immune. Here's the problem. Unless someone knows your address, you might as well not exist. An academician once best described the web this way: Imagine the world's largest library, but instead of the books being up on the shelves in an orderly manner, they are strewn all over the floor. How do you find the book you want?

One of the best ways to let your customers know where to find your web site is to publicize your web address. The most economical way to do this, is to print your web address on everything you print including your envelopes, letterheads and business cards. Periodical mailings to potential customers, is another. These need not be expensive, a post card will do.

The other choice you have is to rely on search engines to list your site and rank it at the top of the list. A web site can be optimized to make it easier for search engines to locate it. There are some basic things a web designer can and should do to make your site more visible. At an additional cost, you can also take some extra optimizing measures that will give you better rankings. You won't get a guarantee that you will end up at the top, but you will improve your website's visibility to search engines.

Is it worth the extra cost? Optimizing costs money. Some otpimizers will charge you a monthly fee for their service. And they will go as far as to guarantee results. The fact is, because of the nature of the web, it is very difficult to guarantee anything. Optimizing may bring you more hits, but will it bring more business. Optimizing programs can tell you how many hits you got, which pages got the most hits, but they can't tell you the most important thing you want to know – who's looking at your web site.

One has to take a logical approach. If you're a restaurant., most of your clients will come from the local area. Why do you want to pay extra so that the whole world can see your web site? You're better off offering discount coupons on your web site. If you are a specialty manufacturer, you may want the whole world to find your site. However, targeting specific potential customers with a simple mailer advertising your site may cost you less. Keep in mind, most web site designers will take some measures that will improve the visibility of your site and not charge you a recurring monthly fee.

Because web search engines change search parameters, optimizing a web site can be an ongoing affair. If you're a web-direct retailer an on-going optimization program may be a worth-while investment. If you are in a very specialized field and your customers or potential customers are aware of you and know how to find you, optimization may be a wasted effort. Certainly, Amazon does not have to worry about optimization. Everyone knows about Amazon because they have spent millions marketing their web site on TV and in various print media. If you want books, you go to Amazon.com

Pulling customers to your site can be done by establishing your link on other sites, thereby directing people to your site. However, the other site will want you to reciprocate by posting their link on your site. Carry it too far and your site will start looking like a NASCAR racing suit with every ones logo on it. Do you really want your site loaded up with tons of little ads of other businesses? This is why web counters are given away for free. Some of those guys are using your site as a valid link, and others use it to surprise viewers on your site with popup ads. That's how they make money.

If you left it to optimizers, your site would contain more text than anything else because search engines can't see graphics. A site with more text than graphics can be a boring place to visit. Imagine a catalog without photographs. How much product would that catalog sell? One of our clients actually composed his story around key words he felt he had to use. The story made absolutely no sense. Imagine demanding your sales person to use 80 or so key words as often as possible during his sales pitch. What would that sales call sound like? Your optimized web site may look convincing to a search engine, but will it be convincing enough to a potential customer. Search engines do not buy your products, people do. Getting to the top of the search list does not guarantee sales. If you opt to optimize, do it wisely.

No one can guarantee a top spot. Used to be, web search engines rated web sites by how many times a particular key word appeared on your site. Optimizing was easy...using a key word in your text as many times as possible guaranteed a spot at the top of the list. If you were in the plastics business for example, you made sure the word "plastics" was repeated over and over again in your text. In the trades it's called spaming a site. Search engine owners got wise and changed search parameters. If the key word appeared too many times, the search engine discounted it as an invalid search and your site would appear at the very bottom or not at all..

This is just one example of how it basically works. In an ongoing effort to try and make search results more relevant, the amount of valid links (people in your industry) pointing to your site and the amount of hits on your web site, was also introduced as a search parameter. This too was quickly overcome by optimizers. They simply created numerous phantom sites (sites of phony companies) with links to your site. It works, however, the optimizer owns the phony sites you paid for (and probably have no clue they exist). As soon as you break off the relationship with the optimizer, he cuts the links to your site. One day you're at the top, the next, you're gone! He then shops for your competition, once he gets the account, he re-establishes the links of the phony sites to your competitor's site and voila! Your competitor pops up at the top of the list.

Another trick is to load a site with invisible text. The text is there, but is clear in color (or the color of the background), you can't see it, but search engines can. The idea is to try and load up a site with more text and key words you would ever hope to present so that your site looks bigger and more relevant to a search engine . Google makes it a point that if invisible text is discovered on your site, it will drop you from it's search engine. That's how serious they consider this offense. They don't even care if it was the optimizer who did it and you had no clue. Recently, they temporarily dropped BMW from their search engine for such an offense. Use invisible text and you're out!