As a web development instructor, I see a high rate of website failure. Some failures prompt students to take my classes to learn more about their sites. Many of these websites fail to produce because of owner neglect and abandonment.

There is a misconception out there that once you launch a site it will just run itself and send money to the owner. This common scenario starts with great deal of attention to a new or rebuilt website. Then come a few weeks or months of earnest expectations for orders and profits. Finally, the site is left to run itself, when the expectations aren’t met. “We are going to put it on autopilot,” is what one website owner told me.

In reviewing the reasons for the failure, once cause is quitting too soon. Quitting too soon is often the result of incomplete planning and understanding about the life cycle of a website. It’s like taking antibiotics for 4 days, feeling better and not taking the rest. Here is a case study that illustrates a common pattern.

One of my web clients is really disappointed in the results of my work. They came to me because they weren’t seeing any traffic or orders from their original site. The site was a Flash site, which is essentially one web page with a Flash movie file, which brings up different screens showing their line of novel gift products when the viewer clicks on the pictures. I searched on their product keywords and found that the site wasn’t being cataloged by the search engines, although it did come up under their business name. They asked if they needed to throw out the Flash. I suggested that instead of throwing out the Flash, we start by giving their site solid keyword content.

So, I spent a few days rebuilding their title tags to describe their products instead of just showing their business name. I also added pages with text relevant to their product line. The market for gift products is highly competitive on the web; so, I explained that we would need to watch the traffic patterns, add new content periodically and tweek the work over time and based on the results.

Over the next couple of months, I watched their site rise in the search engines on the words I had added to their site. But, after that first bit of work, that was the last I heard from them. A year later, I heard through the grapevine that they were very disappointed in my work because they didn’t receive the expected orders. They quit taking the medicine as soon as soon as results started coming in.

Think of your search engine optimization as a set of incremental successes. The first increment is your position in the search engines, generally. Your second increment is your positioning for very specific key words. This increment involves tweeking your keywords, until you have the ones that will get results beyond just visits!

I had one student tell me she was doing great in the search engines because she was the first listing under her name. That’s a given for a site that has been around a reasonable amount of time. The real goal is high placement for generic words that describe your product or service. Those searches are from people who can become new clients.

On the other hand, I had a client whose new site was cataloged fairly well within six days. But, instead of being pleased, she was upset because she wasn’t placing high for every relevant set of keywords. I had to explain that she was competing against some well established sites in her niche industry, and it would take continued work to get ahead of the other sites. She bit the bullet for a while and made good progress.

The third increment is maintaining your position for your keywords, when everyone else in your market is working toward the same goal. The gift company dropped the ball, thinking that once the position was rising, it would just continue to do so all on its own. How high you go, and how high you stay will be dependent on work, analysis, work, education, work, etc.!

Over all three of these increments,  your website has to be comfortable to use and have a clear call to action when visitors get there, or you won’t get the orders, no matter how many people visit. Does your site build real interest in your product within a few seconds? My next step on the Flash site would have been to take their increased traffic and demonstrate that getting people there is great, but getting them to do something is another matter.

It’s a difficult truth, but there really isn’t anything special about your site as far as the search engines are concerned. They really don’t care about your site or how much work you put into it last year, because they are computer programs, not people. Either you get the ranking points at this given moment or you don’t. If you haven’t made any changes to your website for a year – you probably don’t!