The Internet bubble may have burst, but online business is here to stay. Your business must be online, and you must be making the most of the internet opportunities. In order to do that you will need the following:

Website Designer: You need an experienced website designer who will analyze your needs and build, design, and manage the website solution that is right for you. Your website designer must understand your business and your business operations and design a website that is the best for you. Your designer must know Macromedia Flash, Dreamweaver, and animation for your website.

Website Design: You can have an HTML website that acts as an electronic brochure for your business, or you can have a custom website designed that is dynamic. Dynamic sites are database driven websites that generate pages on demand. This could be anything from displaying your inventory on your site to an interactive test or survey.

Website Remodel: You may need your site remodeled to give it a fresh new look. You want your website to convey the look your company image demands in your market. Your a website can be designed around your current logo, or you can develop a whole new look and corporate identity image around your company.

Requirements Analysis: Your website designer must analyze your business and your online strategy to design a solution that is economical and effective and meets the requirements of your business.

Information Architecture: Your website should be designed as a navigation structure and user interface that lets your customers get to what they want quickly and easily. Ease of use is one of the top factors in developing a loyal clientele.

Graphic Design: Set yourself apart from your competition with clean, fast-loading graphics that express your identity and unify your site.

Front-End Implementation: You must have lean, fast, easily maintained html, javascript, and style sheets that work on all major browsers.
Ease of Use: Whatever server or various types of databases, your website needs the right combination of technologies to create a reliable, scalable solution that fits your needs.

Content: The content of your website should be reviewed and edited so that it gets your point across to your customers.

Website Optimization: You must implement the many ways that you can attract customers and create business from your website. Your website must be compatible with the search engines and set up to insure that your site comes up with the correct targeted search terms. This can mean a real boost in your sales.

Market Plan Opportunity: Your website should advance the goals of your marketing plan and present the best image of your products or services. Your website should be better than your competitors.

Keywords: You must choose the right keywords or phrases that describe your product or service so that your website will be easily located. They must have the right prominence and frequency and the right amount of text to satisfy the search engines.

Meta tags: Your keywords must be placed in met tags, and all tags must have the right prominence and frequency in HTML to satisfy search engines.

Links: You need to create links from other relevant websites to yours to improve your link popularity and improve your ranking with the search engines.

Everyone who has a website wants it to rank high in the search engines like Google and Yahoo.

A higher rank means more visitors, and more visitors mean more sales, or more advertising revenue.

If the phrase(s) you’re trying to rank well for aren’t competitive (that is, few other sites are using the same phrase) then getting good placement is pretty easy: Just put the phrase(s) you want to rank well for in the tag and in at least one other area on the page. For some reason this isn’t obvious to everyone: I can’t remember how many times someone has sought my advice about how to rank well for some phrase, and I check out their page and that phrase is nowhere to be found! A while back a friend asked me how to get her homepage to rank well for her name, which was unusual enough that she should have been at the top of Google with no problems. After I checked out her page I felt like asking her, “And it didn’t occur to you to put your name somewhere on that page?!” Actually, her name was on her page, but in a graphic. Google can’t read that, they have no idea what words are contained in an image. And her tag just said “Home”. How is Google supposed to know that her page was about Sally Thunderpizza? (Not her real name.)

So anyway, for non-competitive phrases, just put the phrases you want to rank for in the <title> and in the body copy of your page. For example, you should be able to get to #1 in Google within a month for the phrase martian pudding headache. Go ahead, try it. Okay, but what if your phrase is competitive? Then you’re going to need to develop some good content for your site, too. Here’s the complete recipe:

* Write a <TITLE> tag for each page that accurately describes that page (no more than about 64 characters).

* Try to create two new pages every week. If you can’t do that, try to do one page each week. At a bare minimum, create a new page each month.

* As much as possible, your new pages should be unique, interesting, authoritative, and compelling.If you want to rank well for the phrase electric widgets, then make your site the best resource about electric widgets available.

* Make sure all of your pages are accessible through normal ahref inks (i.e., don’t use JavaScript or Flash links exclusively).

* Link to quality relevant sites. After you do so, ask those sites to link to you, but don’t make your link to them contingent on whether they link back.

* Follow standard website design tips and avoid the problems listed on Problem Websites. Your site should be not only attractive, but super-easy to use, and completely free of annoyances.

* Most importantly, purge your mind of trying to think of ways you can “trick” your way to the top of the results. Do NOT think about the specific nuts and bolts of how a search engine will rank your pages. Instead, build good, quality pages for your visitors, and trust that the rankings will follow.

But many webmasters don’t get this. They write to me asking such things as:

* How many times should my keywords appear on my pages?

* What’s the optimum ratio of keywords to non-keywords?

* Should I seek links from several PR4 sites or one PR6 site?

* Will doing “X” cause me to rank higher?

Such webmasters are missing the point. You get good rankings by building a quality site, not by trying to figure out exactly how the search engines rank pages. It’s counter-intuitive, but you get good rankings by ignoring rankings and focusing on quality. Focus on quality and the rankings will follow. It works the same way in business: If you focus on the money you’ll probably make less money. But if you focus on creating a great customer experience then the money will follow.

But many of you came here hoping to find tricks, so before you dismiss that, consider this: Your site doesn’t rank as well as mine, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. You want your site to rank better, which is why you went looking for this article. And my site does rank well, which is why you found it. In other words, I know what I’m talking about. My sites are all over Google and Yahoo for a variety of popular terms. When I tell you the best way to get good rankings is to ignore rankings and focus on building your site, it’s not just theoretical, and it’s not a cop-out: It works, and it works well.

The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web. Many people concluded that the web was overhyped, when in fact bubbles and consequent shakeouts appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. Shakeouts typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders are given the bum’s rush, the real success stories show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other.

The concept of “Web 2.0″ began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having “crashed”, the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What’s more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as “Web 2.0″ might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.

In the year and a half since, the term “Web 2.0″ has clearly taken hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. But there’s still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom.

This article is an attempt to clarify just what we mean by Web 2.0.

In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:

Web 1.0 Web 2.0

DoubleClick –> Google AdSense
Ofoto –> Flickr
Akamai –> BitTorrent
mp3.com –> Napster
Britannica Online –> Wikipedia
personal websites –> blogging
evite –> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation –> search engine optimization
page views –> cost per click
screen scraping –> web services
publishing –> participation
content management systems –> wikis
directories (taxonomy) –> tagging (”folksonomy”)
stickiness –> syndication

The list went on and on. But what was it that made us identify one application or approach as “Web 1.0″ and another as “Web 2.0″? (The question is particularly urgent because the Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means. The question is particularly difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications!) We began trying to tease out the principles that are demonstrated in one way or another by the success stories of web 1.0 and by the most interesting of the new applications.

Step 1

If you are starting your website from scratch then you have a big advantage over everyone else. To begin with build your site with search engines in mind. this is called “Search Engine Optimization” or SEO. SEO has several components and deviled into two parts, on-page and off page optimization. The first step is to find the theme of your website, and what words people would use to find your site using search engines, these are called keywords. When thinking of these words try not to use single keywords but use keyword phrases. For example if your site is about electronics, then electronics would be a keyword but “bargain electronics” or “discount electronics” would be a keyword phrase. Phrases are much easier to score a better “SERP” search engine results page, (the page that shows the results of a search). It is better to do a site on a single topic, don’t get greedy and try to be a Wal-Mart selling everything, just stick to one category. You may use a keyword tool to help find more related keywords. Another thing to keep in mind is do not always use the top searched for keywords as these are very competitive and harder to rank on. remember don’t get greedy, all you need is a study stream of visitors each month.

Step 2

Now that you have found your keywords and keyword phrases, it is time to work on the contents of your website. Content is the actual words and pictures seen and read on your site. Do not use i-frames because even though your readers can see the contents, search engines will not index i-frame pages. Write at least a few well worded paragraphs about your topic using your main keywords and phrases often. To check your keywords density you may need a keyword density tool. Density is the average amount of times a word is used in the contents of a page or the weight of the words and phrases. Search engines use this to determine your pages weight to the keywords and determine the relevance of your page to these words. A good density is around 2% or more. Use all your keywords but make the page readable to your visitors. Another way to add your keywords to your content is by attaching an alt text to pictures. This is when a curser is moved over a picture a text pops up under the curser describing the picture, also called an alt image tag when the curser moves over a word and an image pops up instead. Search engines will index alt tags, just do not over use them as it may cause the search engine to consider your use as search engine spam. Keep your density to a respectable amount. You can look at your competitors keyword density with some software programs to check keyword density.

Step 3

Now its time to do your meta tags, these tags tell the search engine about your page, it is also where you write a short description about your website that may be used in the results page. The most important tag of these is the meta title tag. This one tag is the most often miss used tag. Most people think this is the title of their website, WRONG! This is what shows up in the blue bar at the top of your browser. If you put in this tag, “my store” nobody will ever find your site period. This tag should be full of your main keyword phrases, i.e take a look at this electronics site: www.yourbargainmart.com notice the top blue bar, this is the title tag, and is full of this sites main keyword phrases.

Step 4

Your website has now been optimised for the search engines, I know this seems to be very hard, I recommend this software to help you do these steps. You can download a free trial version of the software, I recommend after you master the program you buy the full version. This software will guide you step by step creating your site for full optimisation. It will also tell you what to do to score high (page one) on any search engine for your keyword phrases. It will also submit your website to major search engines with one click of your mouse. Go here to download the free version: http://www.Axandra.com/go.to/allaboutwebtools

Step 5

If you purchased a ready made store like get e-store or another e commerce site, you can still optimise your site as long as you have the ability to change your meta tags and content. If your store sells lots of different things again pick on category and stick with it. Write some original content on the pages anywhere you can. and follow the steps above.