photo credit: Koshyk

Unfortunately customers have very little impact on how you rank within the search engines.  And without being ranked, those all-important customers will not find you.

“Businesses tend to spend it all to look cool online and not a dime on how the site can be found,” laments Gartner Research Vice President Gene Alvarez.“

“At least one-third of the design budget should be allocated to site discovery on things like keywords, reviewing pages for Web-crawler-friendly attributes and the development of a site map.”

When making the decision to launch a new site or embark on a re-design answer these three questions and you will be on your way to better findability:

• What is your objective for the newly designed site?
• What critical business information do want the search engines to find?
• Have you established a budget for search marketing?

Spending money on a new site which is invisible to your future customers is a wasted investment.  For more information download our Guide to Findability here.