Dallas Business Services

You hear that E-commerce, that strange looking word that means business on the Internet is at $12 billions a year and growing at a rate of 21.5% a year, so you decide to try to figure out how to find a niche to exploit this entrepreneurial possibility.

You buy a book and discover that HTML isn’t that difficult to write and you kind of understand PHP, and are thankful for those intro college courses you had to take on computers and programming.

You develop a web page, pick a domain name and get it registered and you decide on an ISP. You get your page up and even with the lack of consistency between the various browsers and how they render the HTML your page looks good although a little different one to the other.

You added one of those “hit counters” and you see a few people are coming to your page and you wait, eagerly anticipating the potential of making millions from an E-commerce presence, for that first order to come in.

Yet, nothing happens. You watch the hit counter on your page and it is still rising, by three or four hits a day, but the orders don’t start. You think, “What have I overlooked? Why with millions of people on the Internet everyday am I only getting a few hits on my site?”

Then you realize that besides there being millions and potentially billions of people surfing the web everyday and many of them looking for products your E-commerce offering make available, there are probably at least a half of a bazillion pages available to each of them on the huge vastness of the Internet. Sure some of those pages are abandoned, and a good portion of those are raunchy sex stuff that only a few, relatively speaking, are interested in but they are still out there and your page is just a small fish in a great big pond. How to stand out?

So you go back to researching again and chide yourself for not doing a better job in your initial research into E-commerce. You discover that the way to get traffic to your site is by listing on the various search engines. You quickly discover this is a strange world of gobbledy-goop on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and ranking algorithms and other “Greek” concepts. So much for the intro computer courses you were required to take in college. Even still, you have your money tied up in your web presence and so you are going to research further.

You try to be an optimist and tell yourself after wading through piles of techno-garbage that only a web-nerd could understand or drool over there might be an easy answer.

Your research locates a page that has Nielsen ratings on search engines. Now this you can understand. These are probably the same Nielsen folks that rate your favorite TV shows.  You discover that Google pretty much owns the search engine world with nearly half (49.2%) of the searches. Yahoo follows at second with about half that amount (23.8%) and the rest is divided among the half-dozen other guys (MSN, AOL, ASK, Alta Vista, etc.).

As your knowledge of geek-speak continues to grow, you quickly surmise if you focus your attention on how Google works, you should be all right. You are also becoming the optimist again and thinking that perhaps you can still create your web based business and get to the point where you can work from home and your dreams of retiring while you are still young enough to enjoy it are still possible.

You study optimization techniques for Google and how their crawlers gather the indexing information and then how their ranking/positioning algorithms work.  You know from experience you need to be on the first page of any searches and as high on the page as possible.

You personally rarely ever go beyond page one or two when you are looking for something at Google or one of the other guys and figure in this “right now” world that most people probably work that way. And the techno-garble you re reading make it seem like this is going to be easy, and you are perplexed by the number of companies that “sell SEO rankings.”

Why would anyone bother to buy these services when you can do it yourself? Just change the keywords in your HTML and avoid the stop words or the keyword saturation techniques that the crawlers look for and avoid.  As you research, your confidence grows. Your lexicon of geek words and concepts grows and you secretly worry about being labeled a computer-geek and that label joins the others this attempt has brought to mind. Terms like self-made millionaire, and early retiree. Then your hopes are dashed.

Your research discovers a page

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/maps/thread?fid=19f4b0936485546a00047bf7f4ec9003&hl=en

where users, many of them those who make their livings as SEO rankings companies are reporting and asking for support from Google because of ranking issues. At first you think “Great! Google has a forum like this so if I have a problem, they will help me.”

Then you begin to read what is written there. Listings starting as far back as September 28 of last year and continuing until now. Page after page of folks complaining about “bugs” in the search displays, which you understand from your “instant geekness” is a problem with their ranking and positioning algorithms. Complaint, after complaint, after complaint. In the six-month period the forum displays, Google staff responds a half a dozen times and their responses seem to be lip service and have no real hope of a correction being in the works.

Your dreams of E-commerce success grow wings and start to fly away. You begin to wonder if you can even recoup what you have paid to build your web presence. It appears Google is following Microsoft’s lead and has become so big they thumb their noses at the masses and in their actions or more specifically in-actions are saying “We are Google, we are big enough we don’t need you all anymore.”

It can’t be anything else, because Google is so successful, they have the technical expertise to fix most anything. After all, their search engine is smoking the competition, so they should be able to fix the problems. If they only wanted to, but Google is seemingly using Microsoft’s business template. Maybe Microsoft has secretly purchased Google?

The problem seems to be with the implementation of Google maps.

This brings up a crucial question. If the core of their business is the search engine functions and if adding the maps feature causes that to break, logic says back out the map feature for further testing, and go back to linking to MapQuest or however that was done in the past? Maybe MapQuest has started to charge for that feature or has ramped up their fees for it. Either way logic says if a “feature” is affecting your core business you knock it down and start over.

Closed circuit to the management of Google. With a 48% traffic advantage over the closest competitor, you have some breathing room to do it right. Adopting a Microsoft-like posturing will only hurt you in the end. Microsoft will get theirs in the end. Their deep-pockets intimidation approach or their buying up the competition rather than developing a clean, crisp product won’t work forever.

Microsoft has already had anti-trust issues and will probably have more. They haven’t really lost in the US, but the European Union spanked them pretty good. So it is just a matter of time before the more lenient US anti-trust activities and statutes catch up to them.