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The vast majority of web sites are destined to fail before they
are even built. Why? Because people building sites almost always
put the cart before the horse. Actually, most don't even include
the horse.
Evolution of Your Site
New sites follow a typical evolutionary process.
1. The first stage involves slaving over the design of the site
to get just the right look;
2. The second stage is the publication of the site;
3. Third comes the first thought about how to get traffic to the
site;
4. Fourth, the discovery of pay-per-click options;
5. Fifth, the pursuit of PPC campaigns and realization of sales!;
6. Sixth, the "misery stage", occurs with the realization that
sales are being made at a loss!;
7. Frustration, frustration, frustration;
8. The "extinction stage" - With profitability seeming
impossible, the PPC campaigns are closed and the site just sits
there.
Does any of this sound familiar? You need not suffer this
evolutionary extinction! Taking one step before you build a site
can save you a lot of wasted time and money.
If You Build It, Will They Come?
The first step to developing a successful web site is keyword
analysis. Keywords are the anchors of each page of your site, a
collective summary of your products and services.
The first step to developing an online business is to identify
whether there is sufficient traffic for your business product or
service. Let's look at a very simple example.
If your are selling boating products, each page of your site
should incorporate boating-related keyword phrases. You must
analyze whether there is a sufficient number of searches each
month to make your boating site a viable entity. A free method
for doing this is to use the Overture inventory tool:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
In our example, we would do a search for "boating" to see how
many searches there are for the keyword as well as other
boating-related keyword phrases. A quick search shows there were
over 100,000 searches for "boating" and over 4,000 searches for
"boating supply" in March 2005. These numbers suggest that there
clearly is enough traffic to build a site selling boating
products.
Alternatively, assume that we want to build a site promoting our
hiking guide service in Nevada. If we do a search for "Nevada
hiking" using the Overture inventory tool, we find that there
are only 100 or so searches a month. Should we go ahead and
build the site? Probably not. There simply isn't enough interest
to justify spending the time and money.
Unfortunately, we often talk with site owners that have spent
significant amounts of money building a site only to find that
there is little interest in their product or service. By
performing keyword analysis, you can determine whether a site
should be built before you spend the time, energy and money on
it. There is little reason to build a site that has no chance of
success.
About the author:
Halstatt Pires is with the Internet marketing firm - MarketingTitan.com -
an Internet marketing company in San Diego, which offers online
database solutions through BusinessCreatorPro.com for ecommerce.
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