Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By David Aronchick

Companies have no idea what they’re doing when it comes to home page design. The biggest problem is that it’s all out of order. You talk about the layout, the colors, the content or, VERY VERY RARELY, someone will add some search terms to get people coming to the site (“Arbor Day”, “Lunar Based Charities”, “Free Beer”). This is not to say all these things are the basic requirements for launching, but, they are not sufficient for ensuring your customers have a good experience (see necessary but not sufficient ). A three foot ladder is only going to get you three feet in the air. It simply cannot raise you to seven feet.
 
 
The biggest problem is that most companies don’t even realize what the address of their home page is. If you ask 99% of the people responsible for branding, marketing and promoting companies they will most likely say the page most representative of their company is http://companyname.com . They are, of course, wrong. The right answer is the page where most customers will have their first experience with your products. Your home page is google.com.
 

Search for some of the biggest brands in the world. Inevitably, you’ll find a page where the top link is what they want (more or less, depending on how hard they work), and, if they’re lucky, a Wikipedia article. The rest are, at best, news articles and, normally, random blog posts and commentary that may not even be relevant. That means that eight out of ten links on  the most visited page for a company or product are completely out of the control of the company. For products and subsets of companies (a new potato chip flavor, a movie release, an upcoming concert), it’s even worse – frequently they’ll be lucky to get the top link.

 
 
If you want to put your best foot forward for your company, you must understand that users look to Google as the portal to the Web – not making sure you own that page virtually ensures users will have a bad first experience.
The solution is not easy, but it’s critical to managing how customers understand your company. You must exert some degree of influence over those top ten links. It is not enough to have thousands of links pointing to your home page – your goal is ten pages on ten unique sites. How can you do this? A few simple suggestions:

1)      Partners – Find partners that allow you to customize and control the look and content of the customer’s experience –  at a minimum this would include MySpace, Facebook, Twitter – but don’t leave off other content opportunities, such as Youtube, Flickr, Whrrl or any other site that lets you customize the look, feel, message and content your users will see(<self-promotion> a branded channel perhaps ?</self-promotion>).  Anywhere you can show off who you are, your products and your message.

2)      Find the people who already own them and win them over – Frequently a significant blogger or journalist will review your product in an informal setting (think Scoble rather than Mossberg). Just do a self-search and see who already comes up – if there’s an individual in that top ten, reach out to them immediately. They’ve already done the hard work of getting listed for your term. Make sure they had a great experience or make it right. This is not to say every customer does not deserve this treatment, but certain reviews are worth more to you in the short term than others.

3)      Employee and personal outlets – Everyone in your community can help –make it easy (and encourage) your employees and friends to share their experiences, excitement and enthusiasm about your product. The more content that people who know (and presumably love) your company put out there, the more likely someone who does not know your company or product will find it.

4)      Press – It can be difficult to get an accurate (let alone positive (!)) story, but getting press mention can be incredibly valuable because one story will likely push out a random blog from that first page. Additionally, they typically have incredibly high page ranks, so even a mediocre (or bad review) will help you collect more search juice. Try to talk to the journalist face-to-face or over the phone to ensure they get the whole picture – it’ll almost never be glowing, but, if it’s a responsible writer, it’ll have your side of the story in it.

This is one of those situations where it’ll take a long time to get it right – two steps forward, one step back. However, even with the daunting challenge, the investments you will make here can make sure when people finally do engage with your site, they are coming in with as open a mind as possible. Your home page is necessary, but it’s not the only, or even first, impression about you. Understanding and shaping all the places in the world where your company and products are represented is the first step to making sure your customers have a great experience with you, end-to-end.

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