National Clothesline

Whether you love it or you hate it, the Internet’s here to stay, so you may as well accept it.

Almost every day I hear someone say, “We spent a lot of money on the Internet, and never got any business from it.”

I’m sorry someone ripped you off, but place the blame where it lies, with the “expert” who didn’t get you any customers, not with the Internet!

If you love it, or you just got over hating it, great! The Internet offers you excellent ways to get customers:

Stop and think about how you use the Internet. If you need directions, you don’t get a paper map, you look it up online. If your toaster breaks, you search for “how to fix a toaster.” If you want to go out for dinner, you search for “local restaurant reviews.” When Avatar is released into theaters, you’ll check the “local movie times.” And before you leave for your weekend at the beach you’ll check the “local weather forecast.”

When you go online, you’re looking for information, not for a sales pitch. Your customers are doing exactly the same thing, so if you want to attract people to your website, why not serve up some useful information!

While searching for information, users are often shown paid advertisements for products and services. These ads are usually related to their search. Ads like these are sold to the highest bidder and you, the advertiser, pay-per-click. Since they go to the highest bidder they’re usually very expensive — so expensive, in fact, that it’s very difficult to run a pay-per-click campaign profitably.

Pay-per-click is often referred to as opium. You can make some useful drugs out of opium, but it’s very likely you’ll get hooked, then it’s a very expensive, hard-to-break habit. Never use pay per click if money is tight and only use pay per click if you have a well-funded campaign and need to kick-start it with lots of leads quickly.

Once you’ve written your interesting, useful and informative content and posted it on your website, the search engines will do a good job of categorizing your site and presenting your site to searchers… if, and only if the information is well written and published correctly to your site. That’s a huge if! You must make sure that information can be found once it’s posted.

First, search engines can read text but not graphics. It’s dangerous to build a website that contains too many graphics. Graphics may improve the appearance of your website but it will rank low in search engine results. Adding alternate text to your images does help, but it cannot take the place of good old-fashioned text content on your site. Content is king!

Second, make sure that your website does not have any broken links. Test the status of all your site links to ensure they are functioning. There are tools to make this chore a snap. A website with badly maintained links will not be ranked highly by search engines.

Third, do not create a flash or similarly animated website. Search engines do not recognize flash any more than they do graphics… less in fact. Graphics and, consequently, the website will not be ranked on search engine listings. Having the coolest looking site is not always best and making an animated flash graphic on your front page could be a dangerous proposition since the search engines will not be able to see the necessary text they need to read.

Search engines depend on properly built web pages in order to announce the presence of your website and attract attention to your site but it’s not as easy as it might seem. Lots of businesses have awful web sites that attract no customers. If you want a lousy web site that doesn’t attract customers it’s easy, just type “free web site” in any search engine and follow the instructions.

The first key to an effective website is to write useful information. The second is to build or pay for someone to design a reasonably attractive site. You can do this yourself, for very little money, or you can spend thousands for custom artwork.

The operative term is “reasonably attractive” site. That’s because, unless you are an artist, no one is going to judge the artistic quality of your site unless it’s really ugly. Most cleaners just need a functional site that’s reasonably attractive. You can use traditional web pages, or you can use a blog if you like. Combining the two is a good and popular choice.

To be functional, a site must be reasonably error-free… not perfect. Perfect is great, but not necessary. There are free web site validation services that will check your code and explain each error. Some errors on a web page are usually OK if the site looks correct on all the major browsers. Of course, 100 errors on a page are not acceptable, and there are lots of sites like that. In addition, sites that only look correct on some browsers is also completely unacceptable.

There are some technical aspects that need to be error free as well. Every site should have a machine-readable sitemap that tells the search engines where to find things on your site. Every site should also have a robots.txt file, which tells search engines where not to snoop. There are meta-tags that need to be correctly formatted. These include things like site and page titles, keywords and descriptions. These absolutely must be done, and done correctly, because they are critical to helping the search engines drive customers to you.

Find some information you can “give away” on a mailing list, both e-mail and real mail. Get a list of customers and prospects going. The more valuable your information, the more subscribers you’ll get, and these become your in-house lead list. Start promoting to these people. Don’t e-mail daily to this list! Monthly is plenty; mail too often and they’ll all unsubscribe. There are services that will handle all the subscription stuff for you or, if you’re up to it and have the time, you can do it in-house.

Now that all this is correct, go to each search engine and find-out how they want you to submit your site information. Each site is different, and has its own rules and preferences. Avoid sites that say they’ll submit up to 50 or 500 different search engines or directories. There simply aren’t that many useful ones, in fact there are less than half a dozen search engines worth bothering with.

The final but never ending key to promoting your presence on the Internet is to build relevant links to your site. It's the online equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising and is perhaps the most effective way to get new business.

This advertising technique is known as "link building," and it involves getting other web sites to link to your site. It's like one of your neighbors recommending a good drycleaner. It carries more weight than if a person just stumbled across your web site.

In today's world, there is much more to good search engine listings than simply optimizing your site for keywords. Links are what make the web work. Having a link to your site on another site that has related subject matter benefits you in several ways. You will get increased traffic from people clicking on the link and, in addition, search engines like Google will find the links and increase your Page-Rank Score.