Why Dot-Coms Fail - a Webmasters Perspective

Everyday we hear that another company goes out of business.

When and why does a dot-com become a dot-bomb

After checking few dozen defunct companies, I think the main reasons for dot-coms failure are:

• Poor business plan. In the last years, a lot of investment capital was spent on poorly planned companies that clearly couldnt reach profitability.
• Poor company promotion. This applies both offline and online. Two newspaper ads and word of mouth are not enough.
• Poor financial management. Fancy offices, free food, does it ring a bell
• Poor Human Resources management. With lots of cash in their hands, many start-up companies hired too many people or, even worse, hired unqualified staff. The hiring of friends and relatives often returned no value on investments.
• Errors in the companys Web site. Sometimes hundreds of errors could be found in one Web page. Yes, those Web site builders should go back to school- if they ever went to school for HTML at all.

Ill focus my comments on the last reason:

How Errors in the Web Site Can Affect the Companys Health

Its clear that you can make money on the Web if you have customers. You have customers if you have viewers- "traffic" in the geeks language. And you get traffic if your site is easy to find -- near the top -- in the Search Engine Results Pages SERPs. Thats not so easy to achieve.

First of all your site has to be indexed by the search tools: Search Engines and Web Directories.

Although some Search Engines will eventually find your site by themselves, most of the time this only happens if somebody links to your site. In the case of a NEW site, having existing links is almost impossible. Rather than wait for links to be made, start a submission campaign.

A big no-no is submitting a Web site using submission software. Using software of this type may be quick and easy, but some Web Directories and Search Engines do NOT accept automated submissions.

Its true that manual submission is a time consuming process -- youll have to read AND follow each Search Engines submission guidelines, to effectively perform the submission – but its a necessary step.

Most of the defunct sites Ive checked had only a modest presence and visibility in the Search Engines.

Lets say that you submitted your site correctly, you waited a reasonable amount of time - usually few weeks – for the Search Engines to process your submission, but your site does not appear near the top in the Search Engine Results Pages.

Youre wondering why, right Well, one or more of the following reasons might apply:

1 Your submission was not accepted by the Search Engines. If you used spamming techniques, such as:

• Repeating keywords in the keyword meta tag or using text in the same color as the background, some Search Engines might refuse to index your site.
• Page redirection -- including cloaking -- or building artificial links farms can sometimes be seen as spam by some Search Engines. These links farms involve building Web pages for the sole purpose of creating links to the targeted site. For more about spam please read my article:

"Search Engine Spamming Sucks!" [ http://www.web-design-in-new-york.com/articles.html ]

Some Search Engines also have difficulty in indexing pages that use frames or Flash.

2 Your submission was accepted, but your site is not listed in the Top 10-30. Because very few people check pages after the first 30 results, you want to be in the Top 10-30. There are many reasons why a site is not listed high.

The most common reasons are:

• The lack of your main keywords in the content of the page, in the Title tag and in the Description and Keyword meta tags. Ultimately it all depends of the Search Engines’ algorithm- the criteria used by the Search Engines to rank pages.
• HTML error