Web Site Design by David Rutstein from A to Z

Without any doubt, one of the main benefits of the internet is that it lets you, your business and your web site to be reached by millions of millions of users around the world.

In the other hand, it makes you compete with millions of competitors, millions of web sites that offers the same you offer, provides the same services you provide and contains the same content your site’s contain.

So what to do then ? stay in your hometown with your small brick and mortgage store ? No, you have to find the way to make your way within your  million of competitors.

So, now you have a great site, great content, stunning graphic design, top of the top hosting service, great performance, more than speed internet connection, bunch of services to provide online, but who uses them ? that is the key question we will focus now, how to attract traffic to your website.

There are a lot of ways to bring users to your sites, we will focus on one of them, search engines.

Now a days, without any doubt, search engines is one of the most used ways to obtain traffic, to gain users into your site, to promote your services, and even more, as time goes by, it seems to be a tendency that just few search engines will survive.

In the beginning of the internet and search engines, there were much more search engines than today, but as some of them becomes more popular (for several reasons, from performance to marketing campaigns), the others  disappear or even joined with bigger surviving search engines.

So, what’s a search engine, it’s the yellow pages of the internet, much more than that, it’s a yellow pages with own life, a yellow pages services that does juts wait you to call them and publish, it finds you, analyze you and promote you.

So, if you are thinking about getting recognized in the web, search engine are definitely one of the first things to consider.

Being listed in a search engine is not hard, as mentioned above, even without doing anything else than putting your site online you will be listed by them, the hard  thing to do is to be listed in a significant place, come on, who wants to be listed in page 20 of a user’s search, even more, when do you check the results of your page 20 in search results ?

So the real art (and it has something of real art) is to be placed in the top positions, I even dare to say that the real deal is to be listed in the first page.

Okay, so let’s start our way to get top listed in all major search engines and some good advices to achieve that.

The first thing you need to do is to define the keywords you want your site to be found by.

You can’t pretend your site to be first placed for every term, from “software development” to “real estate”,  so you should carefully define the terms you want as keywords to your site, you should try to be as specific as possible without being too specific.

When thinking about that, the best practice is to put yourself in the place of the user you want to attract and guess what he will type in that small text box area, what keywords would he (your perfect and profitable customer) type ?

You should make a list of several search terms, the order he might enter them, and you should end with a list of 8-12 keywords, not more than that.

Once you have your keyword list crated, you will try to use them as much as possible, in order to let them gain relevance in your page weight.

Next you will have to prepare your site pages in order to be “search engine friendly”, there are several techniques for doing that, we will just give a quick overview of them here.

Title tag is often considered with very high relevance by most search engines, you should place a title that contains the keywords you selected.

There is also another kind of tag, which purpose is just for search engine purposes, those tags are named META tags, meta tags are tags that offer info about your data, the data contained in the pages, you set then information like author name, date published, and other relevant info you want search engines to see.

A good practice is also to add to images their proper text description for the alt attribute, which is not used generally but is very important when search engines examine your site.

As mentioned before, search engines do not just wait for you to notice them about your site, they continuously check the web for the sites in there, for that purpose they use programs named robots (or bots), those programs are crawler programs that automatically browse the web going from one site to another and examine site content in order to be able to rank them.

In order to “communicate” with those bots, your site can be prepared in several ways.

Most bots, when they reach your website, they look for a file named robots.txt, that file when available, is placed in the root folder of your site, and should contain info for the robots to know about your site, what your site contains, keywords etc.

When, for some reason robots.txt is not possible to be added to your root folder, you can add robots meta tags (as mentioned before) in order to accomplish that communication.

But this are all generic rules, search engines are all different, they use more or less the same basic principles but they differ a lot, and that’s the reason of existence of more than one search engine, so, the dare is not just to prepare your site for search engines but to prepare it for as many search engines as possible.

As the internet grows, the power of search engines grows too, and the importance of being top ranked increases dramatically, for that reason, there is a new kind of technical expert named SEO officer, they specialize in positioning your site with major search engines, for small business or personal sites it won’t worth to hire one, but if you are developing a medium or big size site you should definitely think about hiring one.

In the other hand, there are some good tools available there that helps you to optimize your site yourself, those tools work by thinking like the search engine and analyzing  your web site accordingly, after doing that, they generate reports with the advices to follow in order to make them more search engine friendly, I have used them and I can guarantee they do work pretty well.

Another thing you have to take care of is dynamic content, if your site generates content dynamically that will be very hard (if even possible) for search engines to read and index, so you should consider that when planning your SEO strategy.

Ok, now you have your site build, you went trough the process of optimizing it for search engines, now you submitted it  and you want to see the results !

Ok, stay calm, the process of being listed and repositioned usually takes from 1 to 2 months depending on the search engine.

As a last advice, I have seen many clever tricks trying to cheat search engines, like adding “invisible” text with keywords by setting foreground color the same than background color, adding the same tag (like title) several times, resubmitting pages or any other kind of tricks.

Believe me, people working at Google or Yahoo, are 8 hours a day, 5 days a week dedicated to that, so it’s VERY hard to fool them, in the best case, what you will get is your site being banned from search engines and all your effort might be useless.

So, just play within the rules, try to learn or get expert help if you do not have the time.

Lastly,  being top ranked is not a one day work, and also, once you reach the desired position is not ended,  you will have millions of competitors trying to beat your position, so it’s a never ending story you  will have to deal with.