January 14th, 2008
A large number of websites on the Internet have been simply created, launched, and forgotten. Since the moment of site creation, owners fail to take account of the specifics of site promotion to a particular target audience. They tend to overlook techniques for optimizing the site and its promotion policy. They view the site as a kind of advertising element and the Internet as an advertising medium. Companies owning similar sites honestly believe that they have “their own website”, but all they have is a bunch of pages (files) hosted at a server. This bunch of files does not warrant the name of a full-fledged site. Yet you will easily come across a large number of inexpensive services that offer to create similar sites (sets of pre-arranged pages). To be frank, I still find it hard to understand why people are willing to pay for something that will not work.
In the absence of a site promotion policy, its owners are in fact not making use of the main Internet capabilities to attract the required target audience. Using these opportunities subsequently will require either reworking the site (which is something we often deal with) or investing additional funds (usually regular investments) in advertising and site promotion.
With this mind, your site should not merely exist, but should have an appropriate target audience, a set of site optimization activities suited to this audience, and its own policy of attracting the audience.
The main goal pursued by any Internet user is information search. Since any company fully realized the main interests of its target audience (its clients, buyers, partners, etc.), it is quite capable of presenting the information this audience needs. Yet in the majority of cases all site content is limited to a brief service or product description and contact details. Yet consumers always have a large number of questions and common fears. They all need answers. Accordingly, a site containing the maximum amount of information (required by the target audience) will enjoy special trust from this audience and will attract a lot of traffic.