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Why Dot-Coms Fail - a Webmaster's Perspective
Everyday we hear that another company goes out of business.
When and why does a dot-com become a dot-bomb?
After checking few dozen defunct companies, I think the main reasons
for dot-coms failure are:
Poor business plan. In the
last years, a lot of investment capital was spent on poorly planned
companies that clearly couldn't reach profitability.
Poor company promotion. This
applies both offline and online. Two newspaper ads and word of mouth
are not enough.
Poor financial management.
Fancy offices, free food, does it ring a bell?
Poor Human Resources
management. With lots of cash in their hands, many start-up companies
hired too many people or, even worse, hired unqualified staff. The
hiring of friends and relatives often returned no value on
investments.
Errors in the company's Web
site. Sometimes hundreds of errors could be found in one Web page.
Yes, those Web site builders should go back to school- if they ever
went to school for HTML at all.
I'll focus my comments on the last reason:
How Errors in the Web Site Can Affect the Company's
Health
It's clear that you can make money on the Web if you have customers.
You have customers if you have viewers- "traffic" in the
geek's language. And you get traffic if your site is easy to find --
near the top -- in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). That's not
so easy to achieve.
First of all your site has to be indexed by the search tools: Search
Engines and Web Directories. Although some Search Engines will
eventually find your site by themselves, most of the time this only
happens if somebody links to your site. In the case of a NEW site,
having existing links is almost impossible. Rather than wait for links
to be made, start a submission campaign.
A big no-no is submitting a Web site using submission software. Using
software of this type may be quick and easy, but some Web Directories
and Search Engines do NOT accept automated submissions. It's true that
manual submission is a time consuming process -- you'll have to read AND
follow each Search Engines' submission guidelines, to effectively
perform the submission -- but it's a necessary step. Most of the defunct
sites I've checked had only a modest presence and visibility in the
Search Engines.
Let's say that you submitted your site correctly, you waited a
reasonable amount of time -- usually few weeks -- for the Search Engines
to process your submission, but your site does not appear near the top
in the Search Engine Results Pages. You're wondering why, right? Well,
one or more of the following reasons might apply:
Your submission was not
accepted by the Search Engines. If you used spamming techniques, such
as:
Repeating keywords in the
keyword meta tag or using text in the same color as the background,
some Search Engines might refuse to index your site.
Page redirection --
including cloaking -- or building artificial links farms can
sometimes be seen as spam by some Search Engines. These links farms
involve building Web pages for the sole purpose of creating links to
the targeted site. For more about spam please read my article:
"Search Engine Spamming Sucks!" [ http://www.web-design-in-new-york.com/articles.html
] Some Search Engines also have difficulty in indexing pages that
use frames or Flash.
Your submission was accepted,
but your site is not listed in the Top 10-30. Because very few people
check pages after the first 30 results, you want to be in the Top
10-30. There are many reasons why a site is not listed high. The most
common reasons are:
The lack of your main
keywords in the content of the page, in the Title tag and in the
Description and Keyword meta tags. Ultimately it all depends of the
Search Engines’ algorithm- the criteria used by the Search Engines
to rank pages.
HTML errors. Examples
include unclosed tags, unquoted attributes, improperly nested tags,
missing the ALT attribute on images. Any of these will affect your
site's accessibility, reducing your potential client pool. A Web
site with HTML errors can look fine in Explorer, strange in Netscape
or Opera and totally unreadable in a text browser. Although Explorer
has the largest market share, an important percentage of net surfers
use other browsers. Don't forget the more than 50 million people in
the USA with disabilities. Many of the latter use text/voice
browsers.
Other Types of Errors in Web Sites
Proper HTML coding is very important but the structure and the layout
of the pages are equally important. I saw sites without ANY way to
contact the company: no email address, no "contact page". I
saw sites so crowded that it was almost impossible to find my way
around. I saw sites with ugly color schemes. I saw a site so
"heavy" that it took nearly three minutes to download the Home
Page. According to statistics, users have very limited patience when it
comes to loading a page. If after eight seconds they cannot see the
page, they leave. And we all know what that means for the success of a
Web site.
I not only saw all those errors in sites that are now gone but I also
found them in sites that are still alive, including, incredibly, some
Fortune 500 companies' Web sites.
So Do We Dot-Com or Not?
The answer is a resounding YES! But with one condition, learn from
your predecessors. How can a dot-com become profitable? I don't pretend
to know ALL the answers. If I did, I would be millionaire by now.
Advice for Forming and Managing Your Company:
Develop a sound business plan,
with clear, credible ways to get to profitability. Venture capitalists
are much more cautious than a few years ago. They invest less and are
more selective in this risky business. They want value returned for
their money. After all, statistics show that 9 out of 10 startups
fail.
Handle your money wisely.
Enough said.
Hire only the people you
REALLY need and be sure ALL of them are professionals.
Advice Regarding the Web Site that Supports Your
Company:
Do the right thing when you
prepare the Web site. Hire reputable professionals to build and
promote your cyber adventure. If you already have a Web site, remember
that a Web site can easily be redesigned and properly resubmitted to
search tools.
Have your site designed
according to W3C Recommendations - the Official HTML coding rules.
Yes, this takes time and it's much easier to use an HTML editor, but
the results are much better when properly coded by hand. Watch your
site's accessibility and usability. Don't forget to test and validate
the code. Talking about testing, do yourself a favor: check the
spelling on your pages.
Do not use spamming
techniques. You might not be caught today, but one day the Search
Engines OR your competitors will find you. Search Engines sometimes
will use this reason to ban your site FOR LIFE. For more about spam
please read my article: "Search Engine Spamming Sucks!" [http://www.web-design-in-new-york.com/articles.html ]
Avoid gizmos: JavaScripts,
Flash or frames. Bells and whistles will NEVER help your page'
ranking. In fact, it will hurt your site's indexing or ranking in the
Search Engines and will annoy most of your viewers. So, just don't do
it!
Have interesting content in
your pages, content that grabs your viewer's attention. No matter how
beautiful your site is, no matter how much professional promotion you
made, if the site doesn't grab viewer's interest, he will leave -- you
guessed it -- to your competitors' sites. Also, use the Title tag, the
Keyword and Description meta tags in your HTML coding to list targeted
keywords from the contents of your pages. This
helps the Search Engines rank your site higher.
Promote the site thoroughly.
Submit the site properly to Search Engines and Web Directories and pay
special attention to the link popularity issue- contact Webmasters of
related sites to ask them to include a link to your site. Yes, it
takes time, but it's worth it.
So, let's see: do we dot-com or not? You bet we do! There are
tremendous opportunities on the Internet. Find your niche, follow the
rules, work hard and you'll make it. It will not be easy but if you
believe in your dream and set realistic expectations, you'll be
successful.
Good luck!
Daniel Bazac is the Web Marketer for Web Design in New York, (http://www.web-design-in-new-york.com), a site design, Search Engine
Optimization and promotion company. He's been online from 1995 and he's
also a seasoned Internet Information Researcher. He can be reached at mailto:danielbazac@hotmail.com
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