Page 40 - Fashion issue

Business Intelligence
By Bill Edmett
Thinking About Putting Your You can begin with a Google search, using any of these underlined
phrases. For example, if you want an Application Developer in San
Business on the Internet? Diego, you could use Google by searching “Application Developer
San Diego” and you’ll find me, hopefully on page one and close to
This information is intend- the top, because I pay someone to deal with the “Google Dance”
ed for a business decision for me. For now, he’s a good SEO resource, but I watch closely to
maker and not for a techni- make sure he really stays on his toes.
cal person. I’m assuming
that as a decision maker SEO and the Google Dance:
you’ll delegate the techni- As you probably know, Google, Yahoo and Bing are common Cloud-based Home Health Monitoring
cal work to an employee searching tools where most people would begin if they’re looking
or consultant that stays for your product or services. Google, Yahoo and Bing use software
current with the latest tech- programs of their own that are frequently referred to as spiders or
nologies of their industry. crawlers. Google, Yahoo and Bing use these programs to crawl
There will be a cost and and read websites the world over, 24 hours per day and 7 days
you need to decide if you’ll per week. They just read websites and collect whatever you have
get a good return on any to say. They’ll store you content and index it using elusive algo-
investment. rithms or formulas to reward or even penalize you with good or
bad positions in the search results. So if you’re in the real estate
You might find it interesting to know a very brief history of the business, expecting web surfers to use Google with the search
Internet. It began with the development of computers in 1950 and words “real estate San Diego” you find about 141 million items in
has evolved to what we now commonly refer to as the World Wide 0.3 seconds. That’s impressive but won’t help you unless you can
Web (www), when in 1995 the last restrictions against commercial rise to the top 1 to 10 positions on the very first page. So get some
use of the Internet were removed. Since then the Internet has been help from someone who knows how to do it. I mean someone who
used to carry commercial information all over the world. So the knows the best methods for this month, not the best methods last
Internet has been around for a while, but it was only recently avail- month. The spiders and crawlers and the indexing methods do
able for us to use in business and social media. change. From my research Google changes their algorithms nearly
10 times each year, so it can be elusive. If you speak with several
Why put your business on the Internet? SEO experts, you’ll find that they often contradict each other,
My research indicates that online spending reached $226 billion simply because Google, Yahoo and Bing are always trying to stay
40 this year and will increase to $325 billion per year in the next 4 ahead of marketing people who try to game them. Google knows
that you’ll trust them more if search results are to a searchers
years.
I think it’s fair to say that potential customers expect you to have a satisfaction and not just to the satisfaction of a marketing person.
website. It has even become a matter of credibility and if you have If you work with SEO you might see excellent results overnight or it
a website while your competitors don’t then you’ll have an advan- may take a few months, but if you stay with it, it will eventually pay
tage. off.

A Static Website or a Dynamic Website? Think about investing in the Internet.
A static website is simply one or more web pages with information So if you’re not yet on the Internet you should seriously think about
and visual graphics to advertise your product or services, with no it. Chances are your business will improve once you’ve estab-
user interaction beyond navigating from one page to another. It’s lished a presence on the World Wide Web.
something like a Yellow Page ad or a brochure and is good place
to start. A dynamic website is more complex and allows for the
visitor to enter information or request information. Examples of a
dynamic website are online banking or online department store
purchasing. A dynamic website will require a data-
base to store information.

What you’ll need.
You’ll need a Domain Name otherwise referred to
as a URL (uniform resource identifier), one that
someone else hasn’t already purchased. This might
not be easy because it seems that all the good
ones are taken. If you’re in the real estate busi-
ness, you’ll have to forget about www.realestate.
com because some smart person grabbed it right
away, I’m guessing probably fifteen years ago.
You’ll also need a Hosting Service which is a place
to park your website. You’ll need an Application
Developer to build your website. And you’ll need
an e-Commerce provider if you’re going to collect
money for your product or service on the Internet.
You may also benefit from an SEO (Search Engine
Optimization) expert if you’ll want people to easily
find you when they’re surfing the Internet.