Tuesday 28 October 2008

Location, Location, Location

I have been involved the Internet since 1994. When I started using the Internet commercial activity was officially illegal and the web browsers at the time were text only and not able to show images! At this time Internet users tended to in general be quite bright. In the 1990s and early 2000s if you built a good/interesting website and posted the link on some forums and posted them to search engines there was a good chance that people would find the site. These days such is the extraordinary amount of sites available it is getting increasingly difficult to get your website noticed unless you have an online and offline marketing budget. Around 10 years ago some of the biggest websites at the time in the UK were sites like Friends Reunited and Jobserve. I remember reading about how these sites had been developed and launched. It seemed that they were launched in the founders bedroom with almost no marketing budget and basically because they provided a good or interesting service they became incredibly popular. It seems to me that this just does not happen any more. Firstly, it is increasingly hard to find anything that has not already been done. Also as less technically knowledgeable people and some less bright people, come to the Net it also seems that a company can market itself to success even though they provide an inferior service. I am increasingly seeing websites launched with huge TV/billboard and Cinema advertising campaigns. The culprits will remain nameless however often their sites seem to be doing well even though they are not the best service available.

I am amazed by some of the questions that I get asked from time to time by people that our otherwise intelligent regarding their use of the Internet. To give some examples of things that I have encountered recently:

1) A CEO of a small company that did not see any difference between putting the name of his website into a search engine and typing in the correct URL into his browsers Address bar.

2) A marketing executive who demanded that I put his site at the top of Google (natural search) the same day it launched.

3) The CEO of a well known London media outlet that had not heard of Podcasts.

4) The Chairman of a software company who when I described standard software integration techniques reacted by saying he did not understand how it could be of any benefit to any software company.

I must say rather embarrassingly that all of the above occurred in my home country (England). I must also say that I do find that in general I do not see quite the same level of tech-ignorance when I travel to the US or major cities in Asia. I have definitely encountered similar knowledge gaps by people in European countries though. I do find it incredible that some of these senior European executives just literally have not got a clue about emerging technologies or even current technologies. They quite often seem almost proud of the fact that they have a massive knowledge gap regarding Internet technologies. The only way of explaining how these people are able to survive is just quite how important the leading search engines actually are. If someone who can not distinguish between the Address bar and the Search bar then the Search is everything. I would guess that there are quite a high number of people that don't really know the difference between Address bar and the Search bar (and they are probably quite proud of it). It is therefore possible to draw a business analogy between your position on Search Engines and your physical position. If Search Engine Optimisation is done well you may have the equivalent of a prime position on the High Street. You will end up with the equivalent of a shop in the middle of the Sahara Desert, if the Search Engine Optimisation is done badly. As they say in the property business there are 3 important things Location, Location and Location. I believe that this is also true of the Location of your website on the search results.