There are ten common mistakes that hold back most internet businesses without the company's owner being aware they are making a mistake. In fact, some companies pay thousands of dollars to make these mistakes. Many companies do not set out to defraud their clients, the Internet just moves to fast for some traditional types of web development companies.



Graphic and Gimmick Heavy Web Design

Those sites look wonderful. Their graphics are spectacular. Javascripts, Flash, Swish and Active X controls play video and mouse-over. They have a pop-up for new member registration, or they have an animated person talking to the visitor. These gimmicks are attractive, but they rarely make a website stand out, and drastically limit the number of people who can visit the website.

Many people set their browsers and firewalls to block pop-ups, java scripts, active x, and other ?trick tools.? In terms of International use, computers are still new. Many people gravitate to the cheapest computer, believing there is very little difference between computers. Others still use dial-up. All of these consumers will not be able to view the website.

These tools are impossible for search engine crawlers to read. In most cases, a web crawler will leave a website when they hit code that is difficult to read. If the flash or Active X control is on the home page, the web crawler may leave the rest of the site without indexing it.

Not Understanding The Benefits of Each Search Engine

There is more to search engine optimization than focusing on one the search percentage.

MSN search draws between 1% to 15% of referred search traffic

Yahoo search draws between 5% & 20% of referred search traffic

Google search draws between 50% & 80% of referred search traffic

This may make Google look like the winner by all accounts. However, there are other things to consider. For example, the decision to buy rate for MSN is higher than Google. That means that more online shoppers use MSN. Yahoo is used by people looking for friends, and networks.

The search engine should be tweaked to perform well on the search engine that matches the product.

The Pay Per Click programs should also be looked at. The cost, number of clicks, and available keywords should be a first consideration. It is better to receive 1000 people from MSN who want to buy, than 10 000 people from Google who are looking for free information.

Ignoring Social Networking

Myspace.com brings more than MSN and Yahoo combined. Social networking is created around groups of buddies and networks. Most businesses take Social Networking to heart and build vast networks, but surprisingly, they network with other businesses, not consumers. This is partly because they are more familiar with similar businesses, and partly because they do not know how to participate in a group without continually pushing their products.

Putting Your Concerns over Customers

If you are in business to make money then don't make Internet Marketing decisions based on your preferences over the target audience preferences. Common complaints among small business owners is that myspace.com is too hard to optimize, squidoo.com is difficult to design, blogcatalogue requires too much time, and managing a forum is too time consuming. However, all of these tools drive consumers to websites, and then increases both traffic and sales.

These common mistakes cost small businesses countless profits and exposure, reducing the unlimited possibilities of the Internet from a wide ocean of potential customers to a small pool of possible customers.