John Saxon

How to be a WWWow on the WWWeb

In the quest to develop and publish the world's number one business ... site I knew we had cracked it when we entered ... at No 7 outof ... sites on the key phrase ... sta

In the quest to develop and publish the world's number one business related
web site I knew we had cracked it when we entered NorthernLight at No 7 out
of 4,876,060 sites on the key phrase 'business start up'.

Coming from a Sales and marketing background, with a background in IT, but
no knowledge of the Internet, I had to approach everything from the ground
up, with an open mind.

This proved to be of significant advantage, since I was prepared to listen
to everyone, try anything, reject the bad and improve on the good.

We also appear on Lycos, Google, AltaVista, Excite and a myriad of other
search engines and know that with 12 months work ahead we will be the No1
Business site by 2002.

So here are my ten top tips for successful web placement

1
Most web designers assume that the customer is the reader, wrong. It's a bit
like assuming the customer for an old people's home is the resident - it
isn't it's the residents 45 year old daughter. Therefore sell to her and the
place is full.

The main customer for a web site is 'gulliver' or 'arachnia' or whatever the
search engine spider is called. Observe it, profile it, get to know it
intimately, what does it like and loathe. How can you get it's attention?

2
In my experience only AltaVista takes seriously. I know this
because I used mingmong21 as a keyword and, despite all the search engines
we appear on, if I search on all of them for 'mingmong21' I only turn up on
AltaVista. Don't put too much store in keywords.

3
The