The always-on, instantly searchable, globally connected Web offers a tremendous platform

for businesses small and large to compete with equal footing. Millions of companies have

seen the Internet’s potential, and the medium is teeming like a jar of sea monkeys with

marketers vying for your business. But this new landscape introduces a new problem. Or

rather, reintroduces an old problem: how to differentiate yourself and win business over

your competition.

Consider a local music store called Armand’s. They compete with the downtown mall shop

and another record store a few blocks away. Their biggest problem came when the com-

petitor marked his 12-inch singles down to $5.99 and theirs were still $6.99. Despite this,

business remained strong because everyone knew Armand’s name, where they were

located, and the variety of the merchandise, and the helpfulness of the staff.

By contrast, an online shop has thousands of competitors, all lined up on the same

“street,” each with relatively equal pricing and selections. The Internet flips the archetype

of the brick-and-mortar store. The new twist on the age-old problem turns out to be

deceivingly simple—to succeed on the Web, you must be found in the first place.

Old paradigm: the phone book. New paradigm: search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN

have supplanted the slabs of dead trees thrown on our doorstep every six months, and

their information is a hundred-fold deeper and updated every second of every day.

There is one critical differentiator between these models. Search engines are more than

directories of names and addresses. They index every word of your website, offering a

richer representation of your business, and then attach that data to a geographic location

if one exists. Today, users can search by physical location or keywords. As you can see in

Figure 2-1, Google can find Armand’s store by keywords (“hip hop records”) or by

location.

This abrupt exposure has forced companies to reexamine their content. Marketers are no

longer able to control whose hands their brochures fall into, and by publishing on the

Web, they are effectively inviting a billion people to learn more about their business.

Some people might type in “detergent.” Others, “discount detergent refills.” Still others,

“environment-friendly detergent alternatives.” Each combination is going to bring up a dif-

ferent set of results, but at the top of each ranking will sit the company who wrote about

these topics in plain, clear, concise language.

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WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES

Figure 2-1. Businesses can be found by keyword or geographic location.