Everyday we hear that another company goes out of business.

When and why does a dot-com become a dot-bomb?

After checking few dozen defunct companies, I think the main reasons for dot-coms failure are:

• Poor business plan. In the last years, a lot of investment capital was spent on poorly planned companies that clearly couldn't reach profitability.

• Poor company promotion. This applies both offline and online. Two newspaper ads and word of mouth are not enough.

• Poor financial management. Fancy offices, free food, does it ring a bell?

• Poor Human Resources management. With lots of cash in their hands, many start-up companies hired too many people or, even worse, hired unqualified staff. The hiring of friends and relatives often returned no value on investments.

• Errors in the company's Web site. Sometimes hundreds of errors could be found in one Web page. Yes, those Web site builders should go back to school- if they ever went to school for HTML at all.

I'll focus my comments on the last reason:

How Errors in the Web Site Can Affect the Company's Health

It's clear that you can make money on the Web if you have customers. You have customers if you have viewers- "traffic" in the geek's language. And you get traffic if your site is easy to find -- near the top -- in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). That's not so easy to achieve.

First of all your site has to be indexed by the search tools: Search Engines and Web Directories.

Although some Search Engines will eventually find your site by themselves, most of the time this only happens if somebody links to your site. In the case of a NEW site, having existing links is almost impossible. Rather than wait for links to be made, start a submission campaign.

A big no-no is submitting a Web site using submission software. Using software of this type may be quick and easy, but some Web Directories and Search Engines do NOT accept automated submissions.

It's true that manual submission is a time consuming process -- you'll have to read AND follow each Search Engines' submission guidelines, to effectively perform the submission