So, last night I spent the evening at an event sponsored by a small, will-not-be-mentioned software company.  They obviously had spent big bucks to sponsor this event, and the event organizers to their credit made a point of mentioning the sponsors several times during the show.

I left the show interested in the company, and wanting to find out more today I went to Google and typed in their name.

Nothing but pages of non-relevant results.

I tried their name, plus "software", plus even more detailed descriptions of things I saw promoted.

No dice.  Nada.  Can't find 'em.

From my perspective, they might have just as well burned the money they spent on the event.  Since there were no trinkets handed out with their URL on it, I really have no good way to find out about them.

My best guess is they have some fancy website made all in flash, with little or no search engine readable text anywhere to be found.  Plus, their company name did not lead me to an obvious url to type in - so I'm just one more potential buyer, adrift and unlikely to purchase.

UPDATE:

I did find their site after a few more guesses at their domain name - and voila, a fancy flash website with only a few keywords in the meta tags.  Once I found that, I did see that they could be found by an obvious variation on their name - one word instead of two, i.e. "softwarecompany" vs. "software company", but it makes you wonder how many hits they are missing from people that make this mistake.  Obvious take away - more key phrases (exact matches and close ones), more text, more find-ability.

I will be forwarding them a copy of this blog entry, and a referral to a company I work with that does search engine visibility.  In this day and age, a business can't be hard to find online, and even a few small tweaks make a difference.

BTW, Great show guys!  Thanks for supporting the local arts scene in Austin!