When you are a small business you have to take every opportunity you can to get your name and what you do in front of prospective customers. If you are a high tech company, one of the best ways is to have your company's link come up when someone does a search against one of the big search engines, Google, Microsoft Live Search, or Yahoo. Having your link pop up under certain circumstances could lead to considerable new business.
I have to admit, my own compay website, ACRITECH Corp, does not even show up when I search for software consulting companies in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
But after last Wednesday's Capital DotNetNuke User Group (CDUG) meeting, I am starting to understand why. We had a wonderful presentation on search engine optimization (SEO), which is the optimization of your website so that when you "google" it, your links will have a high enough rating to appear near the top of the non-paid links returned. Tom Kraak, of Seablick Consulting, gave an enjoyable and enlightening discussion of SEO for DotNetNuke websites.
A lot of what Tom covered involved how to use the important features effectively in DNN. In addition to that, he discussed how to better position and write content so that the search engine bots would be more likely to properly asssociate your content with your website, thereby increasing your ranking through proper "categorization" (my quotes). Without some of this customization from an out-of-the-box DotNetNuke website, a basic DNN site is going to get lost in the ocean of the Internet.
Well, if you missed this presentation you will be happy to know that we are working on presenting this as a webcast at the Capital DotNetNuke user group website in the near future.