If you want to rank your web site in the top positions within search engine results pages (SERPs), your first tasks are to address how your site is built, how the page content is developed and thematically organized throughout the site, and how the internal navigation is structured. All of these factors impact how your site appears to a search engine. There are many do's and don'ts that go along with creating a web site that accomodates search engine optimization - and many of the "don'ts" are technical issues that can prevent you from being indexed at all (preventing you from even entering the ranking race). It is important to consider a number of factors before you embark on the grand journey of launching your new web site and promoting it within the search engines - taking care of the details at the outset gives you the greatest chance of success in the near term, and prevents you from having to undo, redo, and remedy mistakes that can hurt your SEO efforts in the long run.

Hosting -What does that have to do with Search Engine Optimization?
The hosting of your web site can affect your search engine rankings. Choosing your hosting service is an important part of your site building process, as it is crucial that you have the right kind of hosting situation - namely, one which will provide you with as clean of a slate as possible when starting your search engine optimization journey. Many times I've spoken with potential clients who are on a Yahoo! Store who have said, "The other SEO companies I talked to said they couldn't optimize my Yahoo! Store web site for high search engine rankings, but they wouldn't tell me why!"

The absolute best-case scenario for hosting your web site is to have a clean, dedicated IP address on a dedicated server. By "clean" I mean that you have an IP address that has not been listed on any "Blocklists" - these are public lists of IP addresses that have been identified as hosting sites with spam-related content or those sites which have been engaged in spam-related activity on the web. The major search engines use these lists to help them keep their indexes free of spam offenders. However, while having a clean, dedicated IP is a fairly inexpensive hosting setup, having a fully dedicated server is not - because servers (and dedicated server hosting) are both fairly customized solutions that will require you to:

A.  Purchase a server, or
B.  Pay for your hosting company to provide dedicated bandwidth and support to your machine (or if you have your server in-house you will have to hire a server administrator to manage it).

If you are not looking to maintain your own server, don't fret - you still have options (which the majority of small to medium sized businesses employ with great success). You simply tell your hosting company that you need the kind of hosting that is conducive to SEO! Here is what to request from your hosting company so that you have a clean slate to work with when you are ready to create a search engine optimization friendly web site:

You don't want:
-a sub-domain
-a C-level domain

You do want:
-a dedicated URL
-a dedicated IP address
-a clean, non-blocklisted IP address

There is a good chance that the hosting service representative you contact regarding the above will not understand your request or will pretend to understand - so be sure that you speak with either an IT manager or someone directly involved with the technical aspects of your hosting to be sure that you are getting the setup you need. Don't be discouraged - some hosting companies only have a couple of IP blocks and might only have IP's available on a block that is blocklisted - if this is the case, take your business elsewhere!

To check the Spam Blocklist status of your IP address, or of the one proposed by your hosting company, visit: DNSStuff.com and enter your IP address into the top middle "Spam Database Lookup" field.

SEO and Web Site Design

After you have addressed the hosting issue, you are ready to design or re-design your web site for SEO, with search engine optimization as your point of focus. As with hosting, some web site design architectures work great for SEO - and others work against your SEO efforts.

In an ideal world, your web site is a static html site containing least 6 pages or more (hopefully, however, you'll have many more pages of great content!) Most businesses, whether small or large, have plenty of material to create at least six pages of content about their service or product - however, you'd be surprised just how many companies fail to adequately use their web site's valuable page "real estate" to their advantage. For now, what you need to know is that a static HTML web site - or an HTML version of a non-HTML site - is the ideal design candidate for SEO.

The general reason for this is that when crawling a static HTML web site, the search engines are able to read each page's content and read it quickly (however, we do see sites that have quite a bit of extraneous HTML code that serves no purpose other than to delay the spider from reaching it's goal of reading your actual text content!). With a web site built in Flash, for example, there is simply no actual "text" for a search engine spider to read - the site contains only pictures of text. Fortunately there are great workarounds for Flash web sites that allow these sites to be effectively optimized for the search engines, however I like to avoid using Flash for your site if one of the site's goals is to achieve high search engine rankings - why build a web site that already has built-in obstacles that will need to be overcome when you can remove a boulder from your path before setting out on your journey?

Many businesses have the need to create dynamically generated web sites -these are sites that pull their web page content in "on the fly" - objects are pulled together based on a particular user request, and once this page is created, viewed, and clicked away from, it ceases to exist (now that doesn't sound like a page that's easy for a search engine spider to crawl, does it?). Countless web sites that access page upon page of valuable, relevant content in such a way are missing out on the opportunity to "show" the search engine spiders their content (and ever hope to achieve high search engine placement) because that content is simply inaccessible. The majority of the major engines limit their indexing of dynamically generated web sites in an effort to prevent their "bots" (robots) from getting caught in an infinite loop cycle of information requests. There are workarounds for this problem.

SEO Copywriting:
Developing Content for the Search Engines

As far as search engine promotion is concerned, your web site's text content is your key to success (or failure!). When doing SEO copywriting, it is important to understand that the search engines exist for one primary purpose, and that is to provide the internet searcher with relevant results for their searches. The search engine spiders are just like humans - they determine the subject matter of a web page based on what we read. Even if a web site has a picture of a dog on it, we don't know if that site is about dog breeders for that breed, dog food, dog training, or about a small animal veterinary practice in New York. Heck, the site could be about THAT dog in particular! Hopefully you get the point. It is by reading your text content that a search engine spider is able to determine whether or not your page should even be considered as a search result for any given query. And about that dog picture - the search engines can't even see Fido, they only see an image filename such as fido_headshot.jpg, and, hopefully, an alt tag, which helps the spider determine what the picture is about. Perhaps most importantly, however, the alt tag is an essential tool for visually impaired web site visitors using reading assistance software, and ensures ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compatibility.