You probably don’t spend a lot of time keeping up with how the world of the Net is changing. That's OK. It's not your job. But it is my job and it's also my job to let my clients, readers, and audiences know when things change in the environment of the Net that require changes in their business strategy.
In the last couple of years there have been changes in two key areas that matter to you if you’ve got a Web site now or if you’re thinking of taking the plunge in the near future.
First you had to have custom programming if you wanted to do business online at all. Then things got a little better. You could buy a shopping cart, but it cost a lot and was extremely hard to set up. Then you could get a decent shopping cart, but it cost a lot. All of that's changed within the last two years.
In the beginning there was Yahoo! And very little else. Then we saw the first Search Engines, Lycos and Alta Vista, which didn’t even have a domain name that made sense back then. Search engines got us thinking about metatags to help the little spiders they sent out figure out what our sites were all about.
Then came Google. In just a couple of years it's become the single most popular search engine out there. Being in a good position on Google is vital if you want to get found today. Well, guess what, Google doesn’t do anything with those metatags. To make things even more fun, the entire way that search engines work has changed in the last two years. You need to know how and you need to know what to do about it.
