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Fact: Regardless of brand type and level of web dependency, the Internet is a part of your business marketing strategy. The business world would be hard-pressed to find any brand lacking a website, and with good reason. All contemporary customers use the web as if it was the culmination of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Yellow Pages, and a crystal ball. The web is your customer’s first resource to find information and to exhaust their considered set of brand options. As simple as it seems to create brand on the Internet, any web crawler is aware of the entangled network of search engines and of the constant u-turn traffic of web links. To plug your brand into that considered set is to allow your customer to easily locate your brand and clearly understand your brand.

It Is Commerce

The current host of web development companies suffer from the same diseases that infest today’s advertising agencies. More often than not, web design firms advocate their work as art and not commerce, meaning that they sacrifice productivity of their client for their own portfolio and presentation (as if such a breach should ever exist). The nature by which your brand communicates to the target audience should always be creative, but it should more importantly, be strategic. Web companies seem to be more interested in technology, not efficacy, heavily investing time and energy into design elements and worshipping at the shrine of technological innovations. Clearly these web companies have yet to demonstrate an understanding for the lucrative marketing needs of your brand. The purpose of building Internet brand awareness is not to impress other web developers, who in turn will craft a bigger, brighter site for one of your competitors. Fact: neither you nor your competitor will benefit from this “one-up” mentality of web design firms. For example, if you build a new restaurant with amazing service, ambiance, and cuisine you would expect a significant influx of customers; however, if you only have a single, unpaved access road leading to the parking lot, your restaurant has very limited potential to succeed. Beautiful design and bonus extras do not compensate for the fundamental failure to serve the customer. The operating expenses are all for naught, and the customer probably will pass right by your site without a second thought. There are countless opportunities on the Internet, and you make the effort to plug your brand into the mind of the web consumer because you want results. It is that simple.

So how do you create a web site to aid your brand in stealing market share? The basics are pretty well understood, but the results often prove less than optimal. Clearly you need to imbed key words into your site even though many search engines are not effectively processing them. Certainly you need to understand the search engine matrices in order to maximize the tools that will distinguish your brand from another on the web. These “tricks,” however, will continue to change and morph as the search engines strive to thwart search monopolies. To be successful on the web, you need to commit the same clarity and focus that you execute while attacking your parent brand. You must look at your brand from the outside-in, understanding it from the perceptive perception of your customers.

Key Words

Key words need to express the way in which your target audience defines their needs. When naming web pages, it is important to incorporate labels or phrases that are meaningful to the target audience because you are asking the web spiders to both retain these phrases and words and to associate your brand with those concepts. In addition, these are the words and phrases that the audience would be likely to use in a query entry to begin their search. Some search engines like Google, for example, include in their matrix of relative position a gradation based on links to and from your site. In other words overall ranking of your site is based in part on the ranking of link sites to and from your web site. It is disturbing to consider that the destiny of your web site could possibly be in the hands of a remotely similar site you have never even discovered. This quantitative ranking stands to reason that search engines believe that there is a mathematical formula based on the number of click-throughs to your site and that the community of links represents efficacy. Similar to the importance of focusing upon the perceptions of your customers, it is crucial to gain an awareness of how these search engines perceive web marketing correlations, as a game of numbers and clicks. The purchase of key words and the status of sponsored links create other byways for web traffic to reach your site. At the surface, these alternate routes appear to be a pretty good system. You buy key words of phrases at an open online auction with your competitive set and bid for a position on the page based on how much you are willing to pay for the click-through. There is still waste and you still find yourself paying for curious customers, not potential clients. Knowing your customer’s brandface is the key to identifying productive key words and titles while paying a more reasonable fee. The goal is to both attract the truly motivated clicks and to eliminate the unmotivated surfers. Even if at times the web crawls, your brand should not have to. Always keep in mind that Stealing Share™ strategy insists on clarity and advises that the price of truth is the risk of offense.