Why Dot-Coms Fail – a Webmaster’s Perspective
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(c) Copyright 2002, Daniel Bazac

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
couldn’t 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 company’s 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.

I’ll focus my comments on the last reason:

How Errors in the Web Site Can Affect the Company’s Health
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It’s clear that you can make money on the Web if you have
customers. You have customers if you have viewers-
“traffic” in the geek’s language. And you get traffic if
your site is easy to find — near the top — in the
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
That’s 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.

It’s true that manual submission is a time consuming
process — you’ll have to read AND follow each
Search Engines’ submission guidelines, to effectively
perform the submission – but it’s a necessary step.

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

Let’s 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.

You’re 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!”

Some Search Engines https://www.alexandremthefrenchy.com/ 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.