Marios Alexandrou

The Challenge: Expand Audience

The decline in technology spending can be stated as a decrease in percentage of the number of projects per company. To maintain a constant number of projects, I needed to increase the number of companies who see my message. Traditional methods of increasing one's audience include magazine advertisements and TV commercials. These are expensive and can be ineffective unless the advertiser has a strong brand.

An alternative is to have potential clients bring themselves to a web site containing answers to their questions.

The Solution: Web Site Optimized for Search Engines

Step 1 - Build a Web Site

Informational web sites are the simplest to build. Their very nature means that traditional glitches related to software development just aren't a problem. However, the ever-changing web browsers from Netscape and Microsoft makes it difficult to create a site that looks the same to all viewers. To improve cross-browser consistency, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has set to out create standards for HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

This site conforms to the W3C's CSS standards as well as their HTML 4.01 specifications specified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Step 2 - Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Once the web site was created, it was necessary to optimize it for search engines. Search engine optimization is the process of ensuring a web site appears in the top 10 results show to a user when they search for a phrase using a search engine such as Google, MSN, or AOL.

The graph shown below shows this site's actual traffic analysis. Effective search engine optimization can take a site with little traffic (see the period from 03/02 to 09/02) and easily triple it (see the period from 09/02 to 03/03).

The beauty of the search engine optimization is that it working every minute of the day and once in place, it requires little time and money to maintain.

Roles

Web Developer
Graphic Designer
User Interface Designer

Technology Used

Adobe Photoshop 6.0
Active Server Pages (ASP)
Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)
Microsoft Visual Interdev