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Here’s an online conundrum: How you greet prospects and customers is crucial—but these days, by and large, you don’t actually get to decide where you greet them. Google, in general, is in charge of where most of your visitors will land. And, of course, Murphy’s Law will ensure that they land on some arcane, highly technical back corner of your website—one that definitely doesn’t put your best foot forward.

Let’s outwit Murphy with this three-pronged strategy:

1. Anticipate that ‘‘lost’’ visitors will arrive (via Google, links embedded in Wikipedia, etc.) on obscure inner pages of your site, so respond by making each page of your site extremely welcoming. Include:

• The name of the proprietor (and often a portrait with some words of welcome)

• A live chat link

• A ‘‘first time here?’’ tour button

• A ‘‘contact me now’’ button

2. Consider paying to reduce the wrong points of entry, via Google Adwords and other vehicles that allow you to specifically direct potentially lucrative visitors to where you want them to go.

3. For visitors who, happily, do arrive directly at your main home page, provide different experiences for new (unrecognized) visitors than for returning customers—just as you would in the physical world.* For returning visitors, welcome them back and invite them to personalize their visit. For new visitors (or ones you can’t recognize), welcome them with a ‘‘New here?’’ screen and invite them to start a dialogue with you: take a guided tour, receive some free information—anything to keep them from wandering off before you (gently) extract some way to keep in touch.

*This third principle, which I learned from Seth Godin in the course of a dialogue which became his ebook Fixing Micah’s Site and which I have borrowed here, can be currently seen in action on my company (Oasis)’s website more or less as Seth articulated it. Click on http://www.oasisCD.com; if you’re a new visitor, i.e. we don’t have a cookie in place for you, you’ll be invited to have one experience where we offer to send you an introductory packet of materials. If we already know who you are or that you don’t want to sign up for goodies, you’ll go directly to the “existing customer” experience.

–Micah Solomon

(Jonesing for more on this specific subject? Check out Chapter 11, Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization, Leonardo Inghilleri and Micah Solomon, foreword by Horst Schulze, Founding President and COO, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company.) AMACOM BOOKS, internationally distributed by McGraw-Hill, available here.