SEO

I was at a networking event tonight and I happened to bump into a guy who was talking with another guy. It turns out we had met sometime before. We got to talking about our little companies and in the course of the conversation, we started to talk about websites. "Do you have a website?" I asked. "No" he answered. I was actually surprised. "Why not?" I asked. "Because I don't want to promise more than I can deliver," he said. Now I was astounded. I couldn't believe he had such a lame reason for not having a website. But I did not press the issue. I said, "I hear you. Makes sense," and I smiled.

I don't see how any business person today can afford to not have a website. Especially since it is so inexpensive to set one up at places like register.com. Your website is literally your virtual office and business card. How can any serious business person not have one and use the excuse that they don't want to promise more than they can deliver as the reason for not having one?

It is probably a lot smarter to invest the money in the beginning in the site and have a professional design the site because you want it to serve your purposes, including getting indexed by the Google search engines. For that to happen, you need to have someone who is SEO literate and can competently handle the job of creating the site. If you need a recommendation, email me and I will give you a couple of places.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is really rocket science that only seriously smart technocrats can understand and master. It has something to do with scripts and meta tags and source codes and semantics and all kinds of obscure stuff that when put together, can manhandle Google's "algorithms" and get your top ranking in search results. You really need to get someone who knows what they are doing with this, because one wrong move and you and your website can find yourselves de-indexed by Google, and this obviously defeats the purpsose of having a site to begin with.

One key to SEO seems to be having fresh content on the site at all times. That means you have to go in an update the site on a daily basis, and make sure not to duplicate any entries, as Google's algorithms seems to frown upon this rather deeply.

And, obviousy, you don't want to promise what you can't deliver with your site. But better do that than not having a site at all. I don't see how any small business can be without one in this day and age.