Frequently Asked Questions

My web site got 1,500 hits last week, but we didn’t see a corresponding rise in business. What’s going on?

1,500 hits in a week sounds like hefty site use, which is why the people who sell Internet traffic usually talk in terms of hits and not visits: 10,000 hits for only 10 dollars! But a hit is a single request of the server to complete a single action — like downloading a graphic. Viewing a web page entails multiple actions, or multiple hits — usually more than 20. So visits are a far more meaningful measure of traffic: one visit equals one person. Calculating that each web page on your site produces 20 hits, it follows that 1,500 hits divided by 20 hits equals 75 visits in a week. Divide those 75 visits by 7, or the number of days in a week, and you get a daily average of 10.7 visitors. Hmmm... how’s all that traffic looking now? Call us if you need help.

I read somewhere that my site had to in appear in the top three the results for keyword to get any sort of traffic. Is this true?

One or two keywords won’t make or break your business, and it’s a difficult, time-consuming, and somewhat iffy proposition to create a search engine strategy around a single, wildly popular keyword string (like “unique gift”). We believe in fundamentally sound web site design, copious amounts of relevant, keyword-rich information, and site directories and navigation that invite in the shy little search robots when they come to visit. Over time, this approach will generate a strong, steady flow of targeted traffic to your site — traffic that won’t suddenly disappear when the major search engines change their algorithms. You still might hit the jackpot with a keyword string or two — it’s just that you won’t have to.

My web hosting service offers template-based web sites with free maintenance for $95 a month. That sounds awfully cheap. If they can make money doing this, why can’t you?

Template-based web sites seem like a bargain as long as you don’t think about what you’re getting — or what you’re not getting. These sites are typically so small that they cannot generate any real traffic, and the deals behind them are nearly always structured so that you can’t ever own the site outright. Instead, you must lease it indefinitely; you can’t own the site outright because you can’t buy the template, which other sites are sharing. And should you at some point decide to expand your site, you’ll end up paying ever-higher monthly fees to do so.

Ask yourself what you want your web site to accomplish. Will it provide existing customers with a glorified map to your location, or do you hope to attract new customers? If it’s the latter, then treat your web site as an advertising expense and build something substantial to give people a reason to visit. A whole series of radio ads will deliver customers to your store, but one radio ad gets lost in the morning rush. Similarly, a five page web site gets lost in the crowd.

My partner says our site is “boring,” and wants it redone in Flash. I’m not so sure we should go for this. What’s your advice?

Dump your partner and the Flash. Flash sites were popular at one time because they looked nice and offered such interactivity. Have you noticed, though, that they’re disappearing? There’s a reason for it: Flash acts an impenetrable door to the search engines, which can’t follow Flash links or read text in Flash files. All they can do is glean information from document meta tags, if the Flash designer has remembered to include them. The same holds true for all those Flash intros we were seeing for a while. Not only are they as annoying as head lice, but they may as well be hanging out a shingle for Google, Yahoo, and MSN: “Do Not Enter.”

Another problem is that Flash is not nearly as easy to edit as HTML. In fact, to change anything in a Flash site, one must have the original Flash file (NOT the executable file you see online). This gives your flakey Flash designer the power of life and death over your web site, and if you’re unhappy with him or her for any reason, you’re stuck.

Don’t get us wrong: Flash is a great program, just not for web sites. It remains the medium par excellence for online animation and interactive presentations, and that is its most effective use.

How can I tell how many people have visited my site?

Most web hosting companies provide traffic statistics, but, to borrow a line from Orwell, some stats are more equal than others. Moreover, not all stats are easy to read. Anyway, your web hosting company should be able to tell you how to view your traffic data. Once you’ve logged on to your site, you’ll want to examine the Number of Visits column, which tallies the total visitors to your site (each visitor is counted only once on any given day), Pages, or the average number of files being viewed per visitor, and Entry Pages, which are pulling traffic into the site. If your stats show only Hits or Number of Requests as a gauge of traffic, maybe it’s time to switch hosting services. Without detailed traffic stats, you can’t possibly know how your site is performing.

How can I tell if a search engine has indexed my site?

Go to the search engine in question and type in its search box: site: www.yoursite.com. If any files come up, your site is in the database. You can also install the Google or Yahoo toolbars, which have the added advantage of displaying the PageRank, or calculated importance, of your site. A site cannot have PageRank unless it has been indexed.

I have a small site that gets fewer than 20 visits a day. Do you recommend professional search engine optimization for sites like mine?

Maybe. We recommend search engine optimization for sites that have been online for at least a year, have at least twenty pages of good content (by “content,” we mean text), and are clearly underperforming. Sites with weak content are unlikely candidates for search engine optimization, and Flash web sites and certain dynamic sites (sometimes generated by ecommerce software) will not benefit from even the most dedicated and virtuosic efforts to optimize them. They are, quite simply, anathema to the search engines.

Search engine optimization can be expensive, sometimes costing more than the original site build. But when it’s done right, it pays for itself several times over by attracting so many more potential customers. That said, good design principles are the building blocks of search engine optimization, and may be applied to any site, no matter how small.

I get calls from from people who claim they’ll submit my site to hundreds of search engines. Their rates seem reasonable. Should I consider their services?

Absolutely — if your goal is to throw money away. Those “hundreds of search engines” will generate the barest hint of traffic. Instead, concern yourself with the Big Three search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN, which account for 80% to 90% of all search traffic. Now, you can submit your site to the Big Three, but why bother? It may be counterproductive to do so: one of the major search engines will actually penalize you for submitting your site! If a few links on other sites are pointing to pages on your site, search engine robots will find them, follow them in, and index your site at their convenience.

We do suggest that you get your site listed in relevant online directories, but these are not the same as search engines. Search engines have robots that actively seek out and catalogue web pages, while directories contain themed, static lists of web sites, and usually have no automatic process for adding links. The people who submit sites to search engines for a living use software that spams the search engines and can harm your rankings with them, or even get your site banned. Submissions to directories, on the other hand, have to be typed in manually — a process that nobody wants to sell, because it pays badly.