Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of implementing tactics and strategies that will 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 the search engines including, but not limited to, quality content, generous and diverse external links, page rank, optimized on-page HTML code like title tags, meta descriptions, redirects, etc. and in the end, a site that is worthwhile to users. While many “experts” profess to be able to position you on top of the charts, this doesn’t always prove true.

The process itself isn’t as easy as changing a few elements and waiting for the search engines to notice. 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. SEO 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:

SEO: Search engine optimization	“Science” of publishing information and marketing in a manner that helps search engines to determine if your site is relevant to specific search queries; this should include copyrighting in a manner that provides relevant information to anyone who reaches your site. (Note: In my opinion, they only reason someone labelled this a “science” is ’cause they could then charge more money for it. Good and relevant content on your Web site will bring your audience.)
Link Building	Provide only quality links to your readers, meaning keep links to a minimum and deliver at the end of each link. You will have 2-3 clicks and 2-5 seconds at most to “deliver the goods” before you lose your readers
Google	Google is the world’s leading search engine in terms of reach. They started search ranking by analyzing linkage data via page rank. It’s worthwhile to keep up on what Google is doing; for example, they have been changing their methods of ranking sites; make a few searches, check out the layout and watch it change through the months.
Home Page, Landing Page(s)	This is your main page on your Web site. If someone types in your url (your Web page name), say from a business card, this is where they will land. This page will establish your professionalism (or lack thereof) to your visitors. Keep in mind though, that because of search engines such as Google, it is quite possible that people will come into your site on a totally different page and THAT speaks to the importance of a strong navigation on every page of your site.
Spider (Web Crawler)	Spiders, such as those from Google — which is called a Google Bot — crawl through your site to find relevant content for their index. Example, if you type “maritime heritage ports” into Google, odds are good that you will find the following listings, each of which goes to a different page on The Maritime Heritage Project (a site I have been building for 14 years): Ships in the Port of San Francisco 1849: The Maritime Heritage …The Maritime Heritage Project is a U.S. registered 501(c)(3) tax exempt … www.maritimeheritage.org/inport.htm  Sandwich Island Ports 1800s: The Maritime Heritage Project with …Atlas of World Ports · CIA World Factbook. The Maritime Heritage Project … www.maritimeheritage.org/ports/usHawaii.html World Ports in the 1800s: The Maritime Heritage Project with News …Atlas of World Ports · CIA World Factbook. The Maritime Heritage Project … www.maritimeheritage.org/ports/england.html
	If you don’t have your site name(s) registered already, you definitely will need to do so. I maintain that if you don’t have a Web site, you are not in business. Prequalification by shoppers via Internet research has been growing dramatically through the years. Additionally 85% of net surfers are also Internet shoppers (ecommercetimes.com). Reserve every version of your name and your company name. I didn’t do that when I started MaritimeHeritage.org and I regret it just about every day. Now, when I register a site, it includes .com (of course — this is the main choice and if you can’t get that, rethink your business name as people automatically type in .com), .net, .org, .us, .co, (the newest), .me (it’s an ego thing).
Fresh Content	This is the key to keeping your site on top of the charts. For a nominal fee, through the addition of a simple “helpful hint” each month, I have kept www.WeClean123.com on the top of search pages for local window cleaning companies for a couple of years. If you don’t want to hire someone to do this for you, consider having your site built as a WordPress Blog (we recommend GoDaddy.com)or having a Blog added to your site so that you can maintain it; Blogs are much easier to manage than are Web sites.

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!

If you are in business, you need a Web presence. Web sites are actually somewhat difficult to build and manage; however, blogs are quite accessible. Perhaps you will need someone to initially set it up, but you should be able to take it from there and add new content every week or two to increase your visibility on the Internet.

Overview of Setting up a WordPress Blog
WordPress is purportedly the easiest to use and currently it is the most popular

You do not need new software. Blogs are a perfect example of “cloud computing,” which simply means using the internet to access software running on someone else’s hardware.

Differences between WordPress.com and 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 (here is a link to my favorite . . . GoDaddy.com . . .

At GoDaddy.com, for $10 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 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

As soon as you “open your doors,” you will need business cards to hand to everyone you come across that will direct them to your blog and your services. The best value we know of in business cards are through VistaPrint. We’ve been using them for years and have never been disappointed.

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.”