Web Review: www.lestatdiamonds.net

By Gil Galanti

Located in Antwerp, Belgium, Lestat Diamonds Inc is a diamond dealing company, specializing in natural color diamonds. Expanding its business to the web, the company runs lestatdiamonds.net - a visually impressive site entitled ‘Are You a Natural? - targeting diamond connoisseurs and the ultra-affluent’.

Other than a simple SSL secured form, allowing visitors to request color diamond quotes, this site is mostly an online brochure. Most of its graphic power comes from the site’s beautiful and tantalizing photographs which capture the allure of the diamonds featured.

A special page dedicated to “Customer Accolades” shows selected comments from satisfied buyers, emphasizing quality of service (“…thanks to your willingness to work with us and re-cut the stone w/no additional expense, it turned out brilliantly well! Thank you so much for all this...”).

Along the lines of its marketing strategy, the site also provides some supplemental information on the subject of investing in natural color diamonds, reminding readers that natural color diamonds have enjoyed a stable market value and good liquidity during the last three decades. Thus, by employing natural color diamonds as an asset class, investors can introduce a stabilizing element into their portfolios, enjoying a greater risk-to-reward value. This is the main message the website carries to its visitors. However, I presume there are not too many of them around.

With a zero Google ranking, lestatdiamonds.net is absent from all the main search engines. The site has two domain names - lestatdiamonds.net and areyouanatural.com - but neither has even a single referring link identified by Google. Sadly, as if there are no thematic related websites or even competitors with which this site could have exchanged links, this visually impressive website is a “stand alone” creature in a networked world.

Strangely, the site uses images of text instead of real text on most of its pages - an Internet faux-pas. Similar to the absence of referring links mentioned above, this set-up results in poor search engine presence. The Internet is based on text, therefore text is what search engines look for. If you don’t have any text on your site you have what I call a “Jerry Seinfeld” website, “a comedy about nothing”, only I wouldn’t count on it to gain the same amount of attention as Seinfeld’s show…