Ninja Web Strategies for Entrepreneurs

Estimating the Return-On-Investment (ROI) Break-Even Point for your Website

An effective website is an investment. At some point, the additional business you gained from your website will pay for the cost of your website.

These days, having an effective website is an essential part of almost any small business's marketing strategy. The old days of customers using the Yellow Pages to find you are fast coming to a close. Most people use a web search engine such as Google when they are looking for products or services.

Therefore your website must attract qualified visitors through good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques and Online Marketing, and it also must convert those visitors into paying customers. If you don't have an effective website that does these two things, you are losing out on potentially tens of thousands of dollars worth of business (or more).

ROI Break Even Point

An effective website can be a considerable investment.

So how do you estimate when the ROI Break-Even Point will be? In other words, how long will it take for your website to pay for itself?

An Example

Let's walk through a quick example.

Say you own a bridal salon business and it cost you $2,500 for your website.

Also, you believe that after two months (which is typically how long it takes a new website to become fully ranked in Google's web searches), your website will be generating $6,000 per month in additional business that you otherwise wouldn't have. Out of that $6,000, your net profit is $1,380.

Therefore, after 4 months, the website will have paid for itself:

2 months (2 X $1,380 net profit from website = $2,760) + 2 months (for Google ranking) = 4 months.

This example is admittedly simplified, but it illustrates that at some point, the additional business generated from your website will not only end up paying for your website, but will actually start making you money after the ROI Break-Even Point is reached.

How to Get Your Site Banned From Google

As you know, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the science and art of getting your site to appear favorably in a search engine’s results based on a user’s search terms. Did you know that there are dubious and fraudulent SEO techniques that can get your site banned from a search engine? Once banned, it is very difficult to get unbanned.

Yikes!

So make sure your SEO expert (or Web Master) avoids using the following “Black-Hat” tactics that attempt to fool search engines:

Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid

• Using keywords that are unrelated to the site.

  For example, using keywords such as “sex” or “porn” to lure people searching for these terms to your website.

• Keyword Stuffing.

  This is when you use too many of your legitimate keywords on a page so that the copy becomes unnatural. As a rule of thumb, keywords should comprise 4%-8% of your content copy.

• Deliberately Misspelled Keywords.

  This is when you purposefully misspell and stuff keywords in the hopes that site will rank higher when a searcher uses the same misspelled keywords in their search.

• Doorway Pages.

  This is a page deliberately designed to rank high with search engines with no real content that automatically redirects to the real Home page.

• Cloaking.

  Cloaking is a technique whereby one set of web pages are shown to the search engine spider bot (for indexing) and a different set of pages are shown to visitors.

• Spamming.

  This is when pages with no real content are created specifically to rank well with search engines.

• Invisible Text.

  An example of this would be putting white text on a white background so that search engines can see the text but website visitors won’t.

• Invisible Links.

  Like Invisible Text above, Invisible Links hides links from visitors but not search engines.

• Hiding Comments in the HTML Code.

  This is when keywords are stuffed inside of comment or script tags in the HTML Code.

• Using Link Farms.

  Links farms are websites that are setup specifically to link to as many websites as possible in an attempt to create links for search engine relevance. These Link Farms will offer to link to your website for a fee or something other in exchange. Unfortunately, this usually always backfires and inevitably hurts your site’s search engine ranking.

Cheating a Search Engine Can Get You Banned

If your site is banned, it is removed from the search engine’s index and will never come up in a search. Once banned, you will have to petition the search engine to get unbanned.

If the Black Hat offense is not egregious, your website will be penalized severely by the search engine but will still remain in the index. Remove the offending Black Hat technique and your website will eventually work its way back up the rankings.

Follow Google Webmaster Guidelines

If your site adheres to the Google Webmaster Guidelines, then not only will you avoid being penalized in your search engine rankings, but your site will actually rank better than other sites that ignore these guidelines. Google’s guidelines also help you rank well with Yahoo! and Bing.