Back in the days of old a domain name was very important. Search engines weren’t what they are today. If you were a cheap toys store you wanted to get cheaptoys.com or something similar. People would search for terms and search engines would show the URL that their systems thought was the closest fit to what you were looking for. That has all changed. While the domain name you chose is important it’s not nearly as important as how you market your site and get people to it (aka Search Engine Optimization). If you Google the phrase cheap toys the first suggested site is ToysRUS. It may seem like a no-brainer but in truth it’s based on a more complicated algorithm then listing a popular toy store. This leads to the point of this post. I was looking to credit card processors today for a business. I knew that I wanted to contact them directly and wasn’t interested in navigating through a series of pages till I found the correct page. I simply googled “ABC credit card processing contact us” and Google lead me directly to their contact page. The issue was that it was an outdated contact page that was missing images causing the formatting of the page to be off. In fact I needed to look around a bit to figure out where the submit button was. It appears that they assumed that anyone coming to their site was going to come via the main page and they would then click on the contact page there and be lead to the new version that was nice and shiny.
Never take for granted the good old search engines and how they send potential clients to your site. In this fast paced world where first impressions are important you don’t want potential clients going to the competition because your site looks like it hasn’t been maintained in years.
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