Many small business owners feel that the appearance of doing well will build confidence amongst potential customers. Their budgets aren’t as big as they would like, but that will take care of itself once they begin to grow. So at first, they reason, what they really need is an online “informational brochure” web site. They envision something they can add to the bottom of a business card and a flier, a website address they can have listed with the Chamber of Commerce, or a line they can add to small newspaper ads so readers will come to their online brochure web site full of pretty graphics and photos and a map to get them into the store.
For a few to several hundred bucks they get what they reason will be a good introductory web site that will serve them nobly until their business starts to boom.
The webmaster they approach to do the job (or who knocks on the door trying to pick up the work), whether it be a friend, a relative, a recent high-school grad or someone local who is known to build good, cheap web sites may or may not know a thing about optimization. For a few to several hundred dollars the webmaster who does know about optimization will design the site in as little time as possible in the most search engine friendly way under the severe budget and time constraints that go along with it. The webmaster who only imagines that he knows anything about optimization will do his best to stuff the right keywords into the meta tags section of the header portion of the site, but will usually do even that wrong.
The reasons why things are “wrong” aren’t obvious to either the site owner or the webmaster inexperienced and unknowledgeable of what SEO is all about. After all, ignorance of the inclusion of things like latent semantic indexing in Google’s algorithm is not the kind of thing any normal person not into professional search engine optimization should be expected to be aware of, nor are any of the more than 200 other variables in search engine algorithms. Even the very best SEOs don’t know all of the variables.
What we do know is that dozens of changes occur in the algorithms every year, and what was valid two or three years ago may not be valid today. Business owners who are having a site built as a brochure site might do well to consider their dependence on print media (business cards, fliers, newspaper ads and even billboards) as a way to get a site viewed in order to convince people to come and do business with them. Print media of any sort is expensive.
Those who read newspapers don’t often get up and move to a computer to type in a web address for more – they pick up the phone and call. Fliers are good, but I’ve lost many times more fliers and business cards than I’d like to say before I could get to a computer to check out their web sites.
Computer users use the internet almost exclusively to find businesses in their area serving what they want. Whether it be a nursery in Lutz, (Wayne Hudson’s “Let’s Grow Plants”) or organic skin care products in brooksville (Trish Sprinstead’s ESP Botanicals web site), the Hernando airport business directory (www.hcairportindustrialpark.com)… or any of a billion other pages and web sites somewhere (most of them hopelessly lost) on the internet – building a site that people can find in the search engine return pages (SERPs) is how to build business using a well optimized site. Even an SEO designed site that is only partially built due to gradual work because of a small budget will return results better than a wrongly built and fully completed one.
When you want a small budget site built, expect to pay a couple of grand to get it well started and optimized. Professional level optimization is extremely involved, much more so than the actual design of the site itself, and the 10 to 16 hours a day spent working on the dozens of areas of research, writing and refinement require relaxed concentration and the ability to turn off distractions like wondering where the money will come from to pay the next bill.
