Search engine optimization (SEO) is actually a marketing term created for the Internet. Newspapers used to encourage single copy sales by placing crucial information “above the fold,” as that is what passersby saw in the newsstand.

SEO is simply a process of implementing strategies through words and phrases designed to increase your website’s position in organic search results . . . “organic” meaning an unpaid position, which is important as organic results are more trusted than are paid-for positions.

A “search engine friendly” website is one that has been built on elements appealing to search engines including, but not limited to, quality content, diverse external links, optimized on-page HTML code such as title tags, meta descriptions, redirects, etc. Most important, once people find you, you provide information that is of use to your audience. While many “experts” profess to be able to position you on top of the charts, this doesn’t always prove true.

Most search engines, and most importantly Google (ranked first in search engine use in America with a 64% market share according to 2009 Nielsen ratings) use web crawlers to track potential growth in traffic, unique content, as well as a multitude of other factors to position page rankings. Using the right terms is a way for businesses to promote their brand as well as increase exposure through online, industry specific content.

Optimizing for search engines – the most direct way for consumers to find you online – is a growing practice for established businesses, as well as start-ups and entrepreneurs to meet the demands for instant access to information.

Web sites I have built that are on top of organic searches are on top specifically because of content; the text is relevant to readers, easily searchable, and delivers.

There are quite a few considerations, but the following are most important — in my opinion — and will get you started with positioning your Website:

First, PLEASE don’t use “free accounts” from companies offering you a “free Website.”

Sites offered free have to cover costs somehow, which may mean they drop ads on your site and those ads could be competitive, which I ‘ve seen often in the real estate industry.

“Free” comes with a high price if your goal is to draw clients for your company; the host site gets the traffic, not your site. If it’s an all-Flash site such as Wix.com offers, search engines have trouble reading Flash, meaning you build the site and no one knows where you are. I’ve just rebuilt a client’s site that had been on Wix for one year getting nowhere. It was rebuilt/switched a few weeks ago and it is already climbing the Google and Alexa.com charts!

Sites built correctly with your own solid content may get you into Google’s top ten. 90% of the sites I build show up in Google’s page ranking system. One of my sites is ABOVE the Marin Independent Journal’s online publication; the newspaper has a team of people working on that site. I’m a one-person operation and I’m right there with them, so it can be done!

In case you’re curious about my stats: Content IS King

That said, if you’ve decided to “do it yourself,” then do yourself a favor and pick up any of the following Peachpit Press books by Elizabeth Castro. I learned just about everything I know about Web design, Illustrator, PhotoShop, etc. from Peachpit Press’ books, especially from Castro’s books.

An earlier version of this particular book is LITERALLY how I learned to build Web sites. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the lingua franca of the Web, and like any language, it’s constantly evolving. So Elizabeth Castro has written HTML 4 for the World Wide Web, Fourth Edition: Visual QuickStart Guide, an update to her blockbuster guide to HTML 4. She also includes links to her site so you can check updates to the book as you go/grow.

Many of us at the outset are tempted to sign up for a low-cost or free Web package that proposes to have an “easy point-and-click” setup. Unless you are simply setting up a family album, “point-and-clicks” just don’t work that well, you give up lots of control, you may give up value such as Web site positioning and, again, competitors ads may be dropped on your site. Also, it isn’t only or necessarily the Web site that draws your clients; it is the content, which has nothing to do with point-and-click site building.

If you decide to go point-and-click anyway, at least pick up one book that will help you Create a Web Page with HTML: Visual QuickProject Guide so that you have a sense of what it’s all about.

These books help you create beautifully coded HTML Web pages that perform predictably and consistently across all browsers and platforms. If you decide you want to change a font color or size, you just go to that page. It can be, and probably will be daunting initially, but Elizabeth Castro, who is a best-selling author in this realm, knows that most readers don’t need an encyclopedic reference, just simple instructions for creating their first Web page. This compact guide gives just that: Rather than explaining every tag and option, she demonstrates the quickest, easiest, smartest route to creating that first Web page.

IF you are just starting out, consider a blog. They are much much easier to set up and manage, in part because of all of the exceptional templates offered through WordPress and other blogging sites. Castro has written Publishing a Blog with Blogger: Visual QuickProject Guide for this. Because I learned so much about HTML, CSS, etc. from her earlier works, when I got around to blogs it was easy . . . and, again, blogs are easier in general.

Lastly, and this is SO important: Select your Web/Blog hosting company carefully. Your friendly neighborhood host company may not have the services necessary to your success as you grow. You NEED a company that has a solid track record, is available 24/7, charges reasonable fees, has a friendly/knowledgable staff, can fix things within minutes NOT days and has all the latest widgets should you need more widgets! I know all this first-hand ’cause that is the type of service I have gotten from GoDaddy.com for many years.

Well, not yours exactly . . . but that of your web site. I recently completed a site based on a client’s wishes. This person is a top-notch print designer, but hasn’t completely embraced reader habits of people visiting Web sites. So I don’t think the site will work based on that design and recommended reviewing some of the following.

Concerns:

• Indexing: You have less than 3 seconds to grab your visitors. Indexing on the bottom of the page (“below the fold” in newspaper jargon) is inadvisable. This can’t be seen on a mobile device, which is how many younger executives view the Web, and, generally people will not scroll down to the bottom of a page in any case.
• Graphics must be top notch and compliment the layout and site. If they are poor quality, viewers will assume that you and/or your Web designer does not know what they are doing.

Homework:

• Take time to review best internet practices from the Yale Style Guide site or buy the book at Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites; Second Edition — this is one book that will make your life easier!
• Visit the W3Consortium
• The F Pattern: This site has heatmaps from user eyetracking studies of how sites are viewed. It’s quite fascinating: Web Reading Patterns
• Pick up any well-written book on Web Design . . . as this is written you can save up to 30% at Peachpit.com. Peachpit press has been part of my life since I started building Websites 20 years ago; they keep me up to date (if I take the time to read!).

More on the F-Shaped Pattern (F Means FAST)

According to Jakob Nielson, who recorded how 232 users view thousands of Web pages with their Web Content

Eyetracking visualization heat-reading software, users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.
In a few seconds, your visitors eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.

Basically, they found that the reading pattern resembles an “F”:

• Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.
• Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.
• Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.
  Obviously, users’ scan patterns are not always comprised of exactly three parts. Sometimes users will read across a third part of the content, making the pattern look more like an E than an F. Other times they’ll only read across once, making the pattern look like an inverted L (with the crossbar at the top).

The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn’t attract any fixations.

The above heatmaps show how users read three different types of Web pages:

• an article in the “about us” section of a corporate website (far left)
• a product page on an e-commerce site (center)
• a search engine results page (SERP; far right).
  If you squint and focus on the red (most-viewed) areas, all three heatmaps show the expected F pattern. Of course, there are some differences.

The F viewing pattern is a general shape.
On the e-commerce page (middle example), the second crossbar of the F is lower than usual because of the intervening product image. Users also allocated significant time to a box in the upper right where the price and “add to cart” button are found.

On the SERP (right example), the second crossbar of the F is longer than the top crossbar, mainly because the second headline is longer than the first.

• Users won’t read your text in a word-by-word manner.
• The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. This is consistent with classic newspaper style — an inverted triangle is generally used to describe this.
• Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content.
• If you “MUST” build your own site, please consider using a package from the #1 Automated Web Design Software for Blogs, CMS and Portals. Generate templates for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. I actually use DreamWeaver for my sites, but I also often combine my skills with templates from companies that are known for using “best practices.”

Google Analytics validates that “content is king.”

The Internet has more than 1 billion Websites, yet fewer than 20% are visible; most receive a dozen or so visitors each month.

Many of the Web sites you are up against have teams of writers, editors, photographers, artists, and programmers feeding their sites (i.e. SFGate.com is owned by Hearst Corporation and fed by San Francisco Chronicle media professionals).

You CAN play with the Big Boys and keep your service/company on top of searches by adding frequent content relevant to your business. That is what feeds search engines.

Check your site by visiting Google Analytics:

• Sites developed by D.A. Levy, MarinEStudios

Report as of May 17, 2011

A public domain work is a creative work that is not protected by copyright and which may be freely used by everyone. The reasons that the work is not protected include:

1. The term of copyright for the work has expired;
2. The author failed to satisfy statutory formalities to perfect the copyright or
3. The work is a work of the U.S. Government.

In the U.S., any work that is published before 1923 is automatically in the Public Domain. Also, and most people do not know this, thousands of works published as recently as 1963 are in the Public Domain because the copyrights that protected them were not renewed and, so, are expired. Following are guides I have used to develop my own publications from works in the public domain.

Here’s my standard apology for how ugly most sites are at the end of these links. Sorry! I feature these offerings anyway when the information is valuable and generally inexpensive. Working with any of these publications can change your life for the better.

Public Domain Information Toolbar

PUBLIC DOMAIN TREASURE HUNTER’S KIT

More than 85 million books (and artwork, photographs, films and music) are in the public domain that you can legally use to create your own profit-generating products.

Well-known book publishing companies are now using free resources to develop their own collections of works in the public domain. That traditional publishing houses now recognize the value of works in the public domain and invest time and money into reprinting them is proof there is money to be made.

The PUBLIC DOMAIN TREASURE HUNTER’S KIT includes “Profiteering in the Public Domain,” the “Copyright Navigator,” “Public Domain Success Formula,” and the “Public Domain Treasure Map,” “Masters of the Public Domain,” and more. The author positions this as “pirating,” but it is not pirating. The books, magazines, newspapers, etc., offered ARE free for you to use and provide a completely legitimate business once you understand the “can dos” and “cannot dos” of public domain works.

Promote Anything.
Learn how from the Directory of eZines!

Excellent news:  The respectability gap between you and the folks whose work gets published by a “traditional publishing house,” has almost closed . . .

The New York Time’s executive editor, Jill Abramson, revealed that she has no special place in her heart for print media. Abramson no longer distinguishes between print and online, focusing instead on “the news report.”

Coming from a digital marketing site, that wouldn’t mean much, but this is from the Executive Editor of the most influential still-in-print media outlets in the world, the New York Times.

“There was too much focus in the past on the print product . . . (We) now make sure energy is 24/7 and not focused on newspaper deadlines and rhythms.” – Jill Abramson

About ten years ago, writing for a digital publication, even a reasonably well-known one, was considered a second-tier qualification in a writer’s portfolio. It didn’t matter that fewer and fewer people were actually reading print, those publications still held all the credibility.

The New York Times, and several other large media congolomerates (i.e. San Francisco Chronicle, Miami Herald) to their credit, keyed in on the shift earlier than most of its ink and paper competitors — a decision that has helped the Times and a few other papers establish itself as a digital innovator.

The same thing is now happening with authors, except we’re still a long way from a level playing field. The publishing industry is still dominated by an old model, despite the fact that, just like it was with the news media, any fourth grader could tell you that the future of books is digital.

It may feel like a risk to bypass the publishing models of the past, going straight to digital; odds are that it won’t feel that way in ten years. Right now might be the perfect time to get in, before the ePub industry gets as overcrowded as the print publishing industry.

What do you think? Will the gap between digital authors and print authors close in the next 5 years?

More about our work with ePublications:

• Terra Publishing House on eBooks
• Captain James H. Blethen
  D. A. Levy
  This book would not have been published by a “traditional” publishing house. It is too small and it isn’t “mass-market.” It is part of a series of small books honoring the lives of great sea captains who brought thousands of passengers into San Francisco during the 1800s. No matter how we feel about print — and we buy hundreds of print books each year — ePublishing is filling an important need.
• When Tim Came Back,Eileen Denny Alexander
• Big Wave Virgin, Paul McHugh

If you are in business, you need a Web presence. Web sites are actually somewhat difficult to build and manage; however, blogs are relatively easy after the initial learning curve. You might find it worthwhile to hire a professional (or trade services) to have it set up, but most people can take it from there and add new content every week or two to increase your Internet visibility.

Overview of Setting up a WordPress Blog

WordPress gets the public vote for being easiest to use and currently it is the most popular

Fortunately, you will not need new software, which is necessary to build a Websites. Blogs are a perfect example of “cloud computing,” which simply means using the internet to access software running on someone else’s hardware.

WordPress.com vs wordpress.org:

WordPress.com is free. However, you end up with a clumsy url, i.e. yourname.wordpress.com. If future employees (or your family/friends) forget the wordpress portion of the name, they will not find you.

WordPress.org requires that you have your own url and hosted web site. At GoDaddy.com, for $10-$14 per year you can register your name (or if your own name is gone, a clear and memorable name). YourName.com is the best name as most people automatically type in .com; however if .com is gone for you, consider the newest .co.

Hosting at GoDaddy.com runs around $5 per month . . . Initially you will not need add-ons, so don’t worry about them. BIG TIP: No “dots,” “dashes,” or “underscores” in your chosen name. Absolutely no one remembers them.

Setting Up WordPress

Instructions follow, and I’m on the other end of eMail, but it might be easier for you to go to one of the following:

Online textual Instructions: www.wordpress.org or www.wordpress.com

How-to Video: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/08/21/how-to-set-up-wordpress-step-by-step-video-tutorial/

Or: If you do use GoDaddy:

1. Go to Hosting Control Center
2. Setup your account: GoDaddy is in Arizona, always there, and can help with this if you get confused (which is easy to do initially): 480 505 8877.
3. Click on “Manage Account” to the right of your new account
4. Click Your Applications on top.
5. Click on Blogs on the Left.
6. Click on WordPress.
7. Click the INSTALL NOW orange button.
8. You will have to unzip this file: If you do not have Unzip software, there is a free 30-day trial from WinZip: http://www.winzip.com/index.htm. Download that and then unzip the file.

Your Blog

There is a lot of information to wade through.

Once that is done, go to http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Lessons where you will find WordPress for Beginners. Again, it looks overwhelming, but you won’t need to read all of it, you don’t need to know any of the complicated coding, etc.

Mainly you will need to go to: http://codex.wordpress.org/First_Steps_With_WordPress for an overview of setting up your site. This page has everything you will need starting with a free Theme which you will download from: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ Then to: http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts for information on writing posts and to write your first post.

REFERENCES

Blogs/Webs

• www.WordPress.com
• www.w3.org: World Wide Web Consortium, the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web
• www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/report.html: Overview of Social Networking
• www.eZine.com: Articles re the Web: www.Ezine.com

A public domain work is a creative work that is not protected by copyright and which may be freely used by everyone. The reasons that the work is not protected include:

1. The term of copyright for the work has expired;
2. The author failed to satisfy statutory formalities to perfect the copyright or
3. The work is a work of the U.S. Government, which is free because the Government is supported by the people. (This includes CIA world maps, which I freely use on The Maritime Heritage Project

site without issue.)

Works in the Public Domain

The Original Public Domain Treasure Hunter’s Kit!. There are over 85 million books (and artwork, photographs, films and music) in the public domain that you can legally use to create your own profit-generating products.

Well-known book publishing companies are now using free resources to develop their own collections of works in the public domain. That traditional publishing houses recognize the value of works in the public domain and takes time/money to reprint them, then there is money to be made. They would NOT otherwise take the time to offer them.

The treasure hunter’s kit includes “Profiteering in the Public Domain,” the “Copyright Navigator,” “Public Domain Success Formula,” and the “Public Domain Treasure Map,” “Masters of the Public Domain,” and more. The author positions this as “pirating,” but it is not pirating. The books, magazines, newspapers, etc., offered ARE free for you to use and provide a completely legitimate business once you understand the “can dos” and “cannot dos” of public domain works.

Promote Anything You Have with the help of the Directory of eZines!

A new set of free videos are now available from Adam Short, creator of Niche Profit Classroom; they outline a simple formula for generating 5 figures per month (on autopilot) using a very powerful form of affiliate marketing.

With these videos, you can keep your costs down while learning if affiliate marketing is for you and how much income might be generated. All in all, they provide GREAT education on how to create a money-making affiliate site; an increasing number of my clients are adding affiliate marketing programs to their existing business sites in order to increase income during these tight times in our country.

You can access the 5 free videos HERE and following are ideas of what you’ll learn:

• How to create simple 5-10 page content websites that each generate between $500 and $1500 a month on complete autopilot.
• A secret search engine shortcut that will propel your sites to the top of the search engines in as little as 2 days.
• How to convert all of that free traffic into money at 5-10% conversion rates on complete autopilot.
• How to setup everything on complete autopilot so that each site is a true set-it and forget-it profit generating machine that requires no extra work or time investment and generates income for years into the future

Sounds good doesn’t it? It’s amazing! Click here to get your 5 free videos.

I’m not sure when Adam is planning on taking the videos down, so it’s best to check them out soon.

A few basic tips to save you money:

1. A domain name. An example of a domain name is: myaffiliatesite.com. Domain names are less than $20 per year and can be purchased through www.goDaddy.com. Never sign up with a service that says they are $30, $40 or $50. Some premium domain names such as wine.com do cost, oh, $2.5 million, but that’s very rare.
2. If you do not have a web hosting service, one costs around $4 – $10 a month. Don’t pay more than that to start. Plans can be upgraded if needed, and upgrades are often NOT needed. My oldest site The Maritime Heritage Project is huge and I’m still paying less than $5/month . . . also through www.goDaddy.com
3. Authoring software to create the site. If you do not have website authoring software, goDaddy.com also has that on their site with “Web Site Tonight.” Note: Although I love goDaddy and have been using them for years for registering names and hosting sites, I think it’s best to have your own software as it will make your life easier in the long run.
4. If you are creating a blog, try using WordPress. It is also freeware; that IS available also from goDaddy.com and Blogs are far easier to build/maintain than are Web sites. You can use goDaddy for one-stop shopping in this case: register your domain name, pay for an inexpensive hosting package (the aforementioned “less-than-$5/month”, and download the Blog free from their site.
5. FTP software to get your pages to your web account. With a blog, you may not need FTP software. I use ws.FTP.pro, but sophisticated Web design packages such as DreamWeaver have FTP built in.
6. Joining an affiliate program like Google Affiliates, Amazon.com and Commission Junction is free. If there are costs involved, do not sign up for that program.
7. Creating a PayPal or similar account is free. If there are costs involved, do not sign up for that account.

First, PLEASE don’t use “free accounts” from companies offering you a “free Website.”

Select your Web/Blog hosting company carefully. Your friendly neighborhood host company may not have the services necessary to your success as you grow. You NEED a company that has a solid track record, is available 24/7, charges reasonable fees, has a friendly/knowledgeable staff, can fix things within minutes NOT days and has all the latest widgets should you need more widgets!

Sites offered free have to cover costs somehow, which may mean they drop ads on your site and those ads could be competitive, which I ‘ve seen often in the real estate industry.

“Free” comes with a high price if your goal is to draw clients for your company; the host site gets the traffic, not your site. If it’s an all-Flash site such as Wix.com offers, search engines have trouble reading Flash, meaning you build the site and no one knows where you are. I’ve just rebuilt a client’s site that had been on Wix for one year getting nowhere. It was rebuilt/switched a few weeks ago and it is already climbing the Google and Alexa.com charts!

Sites built correctly with your own solid content may get you into Google’s top ten. 90% of the sites I build show up in Google’s page ranking system. One of my sites is ABOVE the Marin Independent Journal’s online publication; the newspaper has a team of people working on that site. I’m a one-person operation and I’m right there with them, so it can be done!

In case you’re curious about my stats: Content IS King

That said, if you’ve decided to “do it yourself,” then do yourself a favor and pick up any of the following Peachpit Press books by Elizabeth Castro. I learned just about everything I know about Web design, Illustrator, PhotoShop, etc. from Peachpit Press’ books, especially from Castro’s books.

Many of us at the outset are tempted to sign up for a low-cost or free Web package that proposes to have an “easy point-and-click” setup. Unless you are simply setting up a family album, “point-and-clicks” just don’t work that well, you give up lots of control, you may give up value such as Web site positioning and, again, competitors ads may be dropped on your site. Also, it isn’t only or necessarily the Web site that draws your clients; it is the content, which has nothing to do with point-and-click site building.

If you decide to go point-and-click anyway, at least pick up one book that will help you Create a Web Page with HTML: Visual QuickProject Guide so that you have a sense of what it’s all about.

These books help you create beautifully coded HTML Web pages that perform predictably and consistently across all browsers and platforms. If you decide you want to change a font color or size, you just go to that page. It can be, and probably will be daunting initially, but Elizabeth Castro, who is a best-selling author in this realm, knows that most readers don’t need an encyclopedic reference, just simple instructions for creating their first Web page. This compact guide gives just that: Rather than explaining every tag and option, she demonstrates the quickest, easiest, smartest route to creating that first Web page.

An earlier version of this particular book is LITERALLY how I learned to build Web sites. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the lingua franca of the Web, and like any language, it’s constantly evolving. So Elizabeth Castro has written HTML 4 for the World Wide Web, Fourth Edition: Visual QuickStart Guide, an update to her blockbuster guide to HTML 4. She also includes links to her site so you can check updates to the book as you go/grow.

IF you are just starting out, consider a blog. They are much much easier to set up and manage, in part because of all of the exceptional templates offered through WordPress and other blogging sites. Castro has written Publishing a Blog with Blogger: Visual QuickProject Guide for this. Because I learned so much about HTML, CSS, etc. from her earlier works, when I got around to blogs it was easy . . . and, again, blogs are easier in general.