The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success

Chapter 6. The World of Web Pages

What's In It for You?

According to Internet World Stats Miniwatts Marketing Group, there are an estimated 1,463,632,361 Internet users worldwide. This number breaks down as follows: Asia: 578,538,257; Europe: 384,633,765; North America: 248,241,969; Latin America/Caribbean: 139,009,209; Africa: 51,065,630; Middle East: 41,939,200; and Oceanic Australia: 20,204,331. This is the reason companies are all participating in the World Wide Web. These numbers show the staggering number of people who are participating in the World Wide Web.

The Web became mainstream in 1995. It all began in 1989 with 0 domain names (the name between the "www" and the ".com" for a web site), and has grown to more than 176.7 million in August 2008. Domain names—or web sites, as they're more commonly known—have been growing at a rate of 1.3 million per month, according to Netcraft, an Internet statistics reporting web site, each with an average of 239 pages per site. Even though no one knows for sure, or even can accurately guess, there were an estimated 29.7 billion web pages as of 2007 (see Figure 6.1).

The sheer magnitude of these numbers are the force that drives e-commerce, while also making competition difficult. If you have some basic understanding of how web pages work, then you have the ability to out-sell your competition—and thereby realize revenues and ROI that cannot be attained off-line.

Like any other process, once you realize some of the tactics, tools, and strategies, ...