My dear Biz portal- get noticed!

After crossing all the hurdles of creating a business portal and effectively creating it's functional aspects, comes the real hurdle - which is to ensure that THIS particular portal is what customer's will find when they look for one. Easier said than seen!

Broadly, this means the customer may be directed to the business portal via advertisement banners, reference links, pay-per-click programmes etc. But the largest possibility is for the customer to reach via a search engine. Again, not all search engines. According to a study, customers find a business site 35% of the time using Google, 30% of the time using Yahoo, about 15% of the time using AOL or MSN search engines and occasionally using the likes of Lycos or AskJeeves etc. While I'm not professing these claims, these figures do indicate what we know commonly about. So, it boiles down to essentially being spotted by Google, Yahoo and perhaps MSN.

So, the second requirement is that it is not enough to be just listed (or discovered) by these search engines. Most users behave like this(again, a study based data), 75% of the time the user quits or changes search criteria once he/she doesn't find relevant information in the first page. This translates to about ten to 15 results at the maximum assuming user is using a full sized window.

So then how do you get to the top of the search results page? It's not a staright forward formula. The parameters are varied and the web site constantly needs to optimize itself inorder to be found by these kingpin search engines.

Basic optimization is to fine tune primary key words, phrases and descriptions.

The next step is to look for the search engine's ranking and it's directory positioning. This will help the web site designer to optimize it for the most suited search engine.

The next step is to select the best pages or right pages and mark the content for theme-based indexing.

Look for those keywords, phrases etc. that may be potentially marked by search cops (spiders) as spams although it may be unintentional.

Make keyword optimized directory submissions so that webservices can discover the right services in a jiffy.

Once these basic steps are done, the 'get noticed' result is achieved. However this is by no means the end of web designing because a lot goes into Traffic planning, the site mapping and navigation architecture, image structure, site structure etc.

Site hit report and analysis is a key market intelligence area.