I had the treat today to attend a seminar put on by the Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce on the topic of Web marketing and web site promotion. The speaker was Ray Villares, Co-founder of Gravityfree, a leading Sarasota web site design company.

He hammered home the importance of getting listed and having high rankings on key search engines and web directories. He stated that there are over 750 Million searches performed daily on the web. This is a staggering statistic in size but even with that many searches being performed your web site most likely will not be found if you aren't on the first page of a particular search.

Optimizing for search engines requires several key steps to rank highly. These are not in any particular order but are all very important.

1. Creating your site with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) web standards which includes building your pages with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This allows you to remove your design elements and code from the content of your web page and relocate them on a style sheet. The remaining content is then indexed as nearly pure content helping your web pages become more relevant to the search engines and therefore rank higher.

2. Writing substantial, relevant content for your web site. Each page that you want to rank well should contain over 300 words of text for the engines to index. This will show the engines that there is substantial content on your site and will help you rank higher. You should also plan to have an area or content that is updated on a regular basis. Search engines love to see fresh content being provided and they score you highly for it.

3. Choosing the correct keywords. You will want to select a narrow scope of keywords for each page of your site. Three seems to be a good number to limit yourself to. You will also want to select keywords or keyword phrases that will give you a realistic chance to be successful.

4. Developing quality links back to your web site. A major consideration of Google in ranking pages is the page rank (popularity score) of each page. Your page becomes popular when other people link to your pages. The more you get the higher your pagerank goes.

5. Develop your pages with a narrow theme. Each of your web site pages contains several sections or areas that, when are in harmony with your keywords or key phrases, will make your page highly relevant to the search engines. When this happens your pages will begin rising in the rankings.

Noble Webworks practices safe web site promotion and optimization techniques. We do not employ spamming measures that could get you banned from the search engines. Please contact us for a free consultation in promoting your web site. (941) 727-7018.

By Danny Sullivan, Editor - SearchEngineWatch.com
August 23, 2005

[This shows you the traffic that each search engine brings in. Noble Webworks will work to position you high on Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Netscape which accounts for 88.3% of all searches]

The Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Search reporting service measures the search behavior of more than a million people worldwide. These web surfers have real-time meters on their computers which monitor the sites they visit. This metered information is compiled to produce NetRatings results. Below are statistics about searching from NetRatings provided to Search Engine Watch:

Share Of Searches: July 2005

The chart below shows the percentage of online searches done by US home and work web surfers in Jhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifuly 2005 that were performed at a particular search engine. Internal site searches, such as those to find material within a particular web site, are not counted in these totals. The activity at more than 60 search sites makes up the total search volume upon which percentages are based -- 4.5 billion searches in this month. (read more...)

Are you thinking about making a Web site to promote your business? Or are you dissatisfied with the site you already have? Molly Joss passes on some hard-earned wisdom on day 4 of Creatievpro.com's Self-Promotion Week.

(creativepro.com)
By Molly W. Joss, creativepro.com contributing editor
Thursday, May 26, 2005

[This article by Molly W. Joss is a good reminder that it's a good idea to use professional web design services if you want to have a web site that will impress your clients rather than turn them off.]

Creation isn't always the tidiest process in the world. Sometimes it gets caught in the snarls of daily life or grinds to a halt completely while you earn a living. For years, that was the case with my Web site, which was supposed to be a key piece in the promotional plan for my writing and analyst business.
Long ago, I supposedly learned that just because you can do something yourself doesn't mean that you should. Your time may be better spent doing other things -- things that you enjoy more, make you more money, or don't aggravate you as much. For example, I could change the oil in my car, but I'd rather read the paper while the dealer does it for me. I could also shingle my own roof, but that doesn't mean I'd do the best job.

You think I would have followed this sensible line of reasoning when it came time to create my own Web site. But I didn't, and it took me years to learn the lesson anew. My pain is your gain, however, because my experience can be like a mini-guide for you.

Ask For Help
While I had a Web site before I turned to a professional, it was limp, limited, and an embarrassment. I'm not sure what kept me from turning over the job to a Web designer sooner. Maybe I figured that because I had FrontPage and some design skills, I should do it myself. I should have remembered that a few roof shingles and some nails don't make me a roofer.

It was shame that got me going in the end -- that and a friendly face. At a conference for non-profit organizations, I talked to a nice woman who was holding fort in one of the smaller booths. A few years previously she had started a Web design firm to serve non-profits and small businesses. She showed me examples of sites she'd designed, and then she asked the right question: "What do you want your site to do for you?"

It was the right question because it made me think about the site as a business owner, not as a designer. As a designer, I was only concerned with my site's appearance, and I didn't have the proper skills to create the beautiful design I could envision. So, the creative process crashed. As a business owner, I knew what I wanted to make happen. Changing my role in the project changed my perspective and helped me let go. It also helped that the sites she showed me were clean, attractive, and professional, and that when we talked about fees my heart didn't skip a beat.

Even if you're a wiz at Web design, you can still profit from calling on experts in the areas where you're lacking. For example, your site probably isn't all images. If you're not so good at words, an editor will make sure your site's words are clear and correct.

Enough, But Not Too Much
As a business owner, I wanted a site that would let prospective clients know about me from a distance. They could find out more about me without having to come to me for the information and thus reveal themselves as potential customers. When they were ready, they could send me an e-mail or get my telephone number. It would be, in effect, a big digital billboard. Also like a billboard, it wouldn't include everything.

Would-be clients can quickly find samples of my work and how to reach me.

I made the decision not to include the complete text of my articles. I'd seen too many examples where full text of articles posted on public sites had been lifted, borrowed -- okay, let's be frank -- ripped off. I once got an e-mail from someone in China asking me a question about an article I'd written. When I asked the editor why he was selling the foreign rights without compensating me, he was flabbergasted. Turns out a daily newspaper in China found the article on the Web and reprinted it without permission. After a few letters to the Chinese publishers, the editor gave up and pulled all of the latest content from the publication's site. So, even though I own the copyright or have reprint permission for most of my work, I opted to put limited samples on my site.

To protect my intellectual property, the site includes only small portions of my articles.

I also limit the site's original artwork to one new image every few months. If someone wants to copy it, that's fine with me because I didn't put a lot of energy and time into creating it. As a visual creative pro, you don't have that same option, but you can digitally watermark or lock images so they can't be copied.

A Self-Promoter's Work Is Never Done
I have several items on my site to-do list:

Make sure the site pops up closer to the top of search engines' results pages.
Add my URL to the short bio and credits at the end of the articles.
Refresh images and writing samples.
These tasks will always be on my to-do list, actually, and they should be on yours, too. Self promotion is like a good Web site -- done right, it's a project that never really ends. It's also an important part of doing business, and it's something you need help to do right. I've learned my lesson, I think. I hope.

Read more by Molly Joss.