If you gave a potential client a business card in 1996 and it had a Web site listed on it, you were legit. The general consensus would have been your business was on the cutting edge, and it was pushing towards the future. By the early 2000s, if you didn’t have a Web site, you were already years behind. I can’t remember the last time I heard a client say, “Well, we’ve been around for about ten years, we think it’s time for a Web site.”

Those days are long gone; the whole world has a Web site. Netcraft is reporting that as of 2009, the Web now has over 233 million Web sites. So what now? If you already have a Web site, how do you make it better? Redesign it? That ship sailed years ago. We are well past the days of having difficulty finding a company to give you a good looking site; there’s one on every corner. The landscape has changed, and the RFPs we respond to focus all of our attention on strategy. We no longer talk to clients about just their Web site, but instead their Web presence.

So what is Web presence? In a sense, your company’s Web presence covers every single point of mention on the Web. This includes not only what you produce, but also what others produce for you. Between Twitter, Facebook Facebook test (   -2 | 102 ) blogs and all of the other avenues of user communication, your Web presence may have grown without you even knowing it.

All of this information is out there, so why not use it to your advantage? Social media allows you to surface this content on your Web site. Let’s say you go to search.twitter.com and search for your company’s name. The results show that there are lots of tweets relating to your company, most positive, some negative, and a few questions from users looking for help. All of this can be used to your advantage.

You can take the search results and surface them on your site. Now when users come to your site they see the good tweets about you! But what about the negative tweets? Well, sign up for a Twitter account and respond to them directly in an effort to change the users’ perspective. More companies are doing things like this every day to create transparency. And for those asking questions, you can respond directly to inquiries. Now your site shows positive tweets, how you respond to the few negative tweets, and how you answer users’ questions.

What other ways can you grow your Web presence?