Is Your Site Costing You Money?
If it is optimized wrong it could be. The basis of search engine optimization (SEO) is to make your website visible to potential customers, but if your site is not properly optimized you could be missing out on untold amount of customers. Some big companies have trouble with this, companies that you wouldn’t think that they need the extra bump in customers.
Some of the worst offenders of bad SEO are Las Vegas casinos. Many of them are missing out on thousands of customers every month due to poorly optimized sites. Google says the average monthly search volume for the word “casino” is 20,400,000*, and when you search the word “casino” the first listing is the movie “Casino”. The first actual casino that shows up is a tribal casino is Connecticut. The first Vegas casino that is listed is Harrah’s and they are #4, which is good considering they are the only Las Vegas casino until Hooters Casino on page 4. Now, realistically speaking, people would see these results and try a different search term like
“Las Vegas casino” (1,000,000/mo.)*or “Las Vegas hotel” (5,000,000/mo.)*, but just imagine if you owned one of those giant casinos. Wouldn’t you want to be on the first page, if not in the top 5 listings?
Going back to our original search term “casino”, imagine that you own a casino in Las Vegas. Say 1% of those 20 million people visit your site, that’s 200 thousand visitors a month. Now out of those 200 thousand visitors, only 2000 or so actually visit your casino, whether by booking a room or just stopping by, and spent on average of $1,000 each. That’s and extra $2 million as month. This is just a basic example of how proper SEO can help your business; it’s all about presence on the web.
SEO is not an easy task, it takes time. The amount of time depends on the individual keywords that you choose. The best types of keywords to pick are those that have a high search volume, and a relatively low competition. It is the same concept as starting a business in the real world. For example, you probably wouldn’t open an electronics store across the street from Best Buy and Wal-Mart, but a gas stat
ion or electronic repair shop might do well in that location.
A big part of SEO is how your site is built and written. There are two ways to make a website, Flash, and HTML. These two can be mixed, but it needs to be done the right way. Google does not like Flash websites simple because it cannot read and index the Flash content. It sees Flash as a file and a script running the file. On the other hand, Google loves HTML because it can read the content. However, there is a bit of a tradeoff between the two. Flash makes your site look really good and there are a lot of things that can be done with Flash. HTML is versatile, but doesn’t give the same kind of flare that Flash does. The key is finding a good balance between the two so Google can index your site.
Over using Flash is another problem Las Vegas casinos have when building their websites. Wynn Las Vegas’ website (www.wynnlasvegas.com) is built entirely out of Flash; there is not one bit of Google friendly content in their site which makes its hard for it to be ranked and indexed well. Over using HTML can also be a problem when building your site. Too much can make your site hard to be indexed and ranked, too little and your site looks bland. The trick is to find the perfect balance between HTML tags and actual content. Correctly balanced HTML content spiced up with some Flash can make for a really good looking site that can be read easily by Google. That is the first step to making a good presence on the web.
The Web Squad has studied and discovered the formulas for making good, indexable websites for your business. Whether you are thinking about getting a website or already have one, The Web Squad is here to help your online presence.
-The Web Squad
*Using Google Adwords keyword tool 9/23/09
Is Your Site Costing You Money by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thewebsquad.wordpress.com.