If the topic of this post sounds unbelievable, I hope to open your eyes by the time you finish reading. As with most of my posts, I was gripped by a recent experience I had with a potential customer who owns a car detailing shop. Since we started talking almost two months ago, each discussion he and I have had about considering a website for his business has been a discussion about colors and music. As I attempt to steer the direction of the conversation to more relevant topics, on which his decision should be based, he insists on discussing background music and how he wants “red and yellow everywhere.” Here’s the problem in a nutshell: this business owner is missing a very important point.

Don’t get me wrong. A good looking website is important, and I always intend to use the colors and design schemes that mirror what the client wants. But the truth is that his website is going to be a tool. Some businesses choose to use it primarily as a tool of credibility, an “online brochure,” if you will. But the true power behind a properly designed web presence is in the additional exposure that a properly optimized website can bring to your company…the new customers that your website can attract to your business who would not otherwise find you were it not for your web presence.

For the business owner who may be unfamiliar with these terms, “search engine optimization” simply means making a site search-engine-friendly.  Optimization occurs after the actual design of the site is complete, and involves making the site visible to the search-engines and their “spiders,” or their programs that crawl the web in search of sites with valuable information.  Optimizing a site is vital to properly market the site to Search Engines.

When making the initial decision to possibly invest in a website for your business, the important questions to be asking are NOT questions about design details. Instead, here are a few important examples of questions to ask when you begin this process:

• How long will it take to have a properly optimized site online?
• How do you optimize my site after design is complete?
• Do I have the ability to submit the site regularly to search engines? Or can you provide this service every 4-5 weeks, and at what additional cost?
• Can I control the addition of new and fresh content at my discretion to attract ongoing Search Engine attention?

Certainly, a poor-looking website that attracts new customers is not what you want either, but recognize the priorities in the appropriate order of importance. Determine a developer’s ability to provide your business with proper visibility first, then worry about making the site look the way you want it. In reality, the latter objective is the easy part that most any developer can accomplish for you.

Getting the traffic to your site is the vital skill that not all site designers possess.

Promoting your website is one of the most powerful ways you can assure that users will find your site. Hiring a website promotion firm can likely get the job done, but the cost can be prohibitive to smaller businesses, usually costing anywhere between $200 and $2,000 per month.  With an integrated website promotion tool that is standard in many turn-key website design packages, you can assure your proper visibility and well structured internet marketing. For preferred customers, your developer that provides you with your turn-key package may even handle the submission of your site to search engines every 5 to 6 weeks, properly initiate automatic content changes, and work for proper optimization and ranked placement within Google in seven to nine months.  Also using tools that come standard with your turn-key solution software, your developer can use meta data keywords for further search engine optimization (SEO). There are many ways to market your site online, including cost-based options like pay-per-click advertising (PPC), but all of our website optimization can usually be done using a turn-key package’s tools that you have already paid for, which means website optimization at no additional cost.  And all of this kind of optimization should be done using natural optimization techniques…no tricks to which the search engines will eventually stop paying attention.