Before we go any farther there are a few basic things you should know upfront.

Good search engine listing placement takes time. Sometimes you may get lucky and see results in less than 4 weeks. However, it generally takes anywhere from 6 weeks - 6 months to see any significant changes in your search engine listing placement and it is extremely rare to go from nowhere into the top 20 on the first shot. Expect it to take months.

Also, expect to have to make modifications to your site content every 2 - 3 months until you get your site listed as high as possible. There’s alot of trial and error involved for you to be able to figure out what the search engines want to see to be able to get your website well listed. Only highly experienced webmasters know how to get into the top 20 on the first try. To get that same experience, you will need to try, fail, investigate, learn, try again, and repeat the whole process multiple times. The object of this series of articles is to help you to learn the process, teach you how to learn from your results and mistakes, and to hopefully reduce the amount of times you will have to repeat the process to get the results you want.

Getting good placement takes a reasonable amount of effort. There is no magic wand. You will need to do some significant reading, research, and writing to get any kind of decent search engine listing placement.

This article is being written in January 2003 based on proven techniques that work at the time. All the top search engines will tend to change the way they determine their listings 2 - 3 times per year. Some will change only slightly and some will change dramatically. That means you will need to try to stay on top of those changes and keep track of how they affect your search engine listing placement. * Note - We do periodically review and revise this information to make sure it is as current as possible. The latest review was done in January 2007 and all information is still just as effective as it was when originally written. Remember that because “so called experts” and fads will come and go the longer your site is online. Don’t get caught up chasing after them. SEO (search engine optimization) fundamentals will likely never change.

The information we are about to share is very valuable. Many other companies charge hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars to do the things we are going to share with you. Try to keep that in mind while you are doing all the work on your own and that will help you to see the light at the end of the tunnel. We use the exact same tactics to get our own website pages listed high in the search engines. Most of which we have gotten and held for over 5 years without any modifications the entire time.

Getting good search engine listing placement is remarkably easy if you do it properly. However, if you choose to try and do it improperly by applying our recommendations excessively then you run the risk of getting your site banned from all the search engines. There’s a fine line between good search engine optimization and bad. Consider yourself warned.

Because this lesson is quite long, we have broken it up and put it on several pages. Having it on several pages also increases the possibility that more of our own site pages will get well indexed by the search engines for this particular topic. That is one of the parts of your lesson. The more pages your site has and the more you get indexed the better.

First, the definition of bulk email marketing varies depending on who you ask. Some people refer to it as mass marketing, direct marketing, or opt-in marketing of a product or service to 2 or more people simultaneously via their email address. People who prefer that definition are usually the senders of the email. Others refer to bulk email marketing as SPAM. Those people are usually the recipients of bulk email marketing.

SPAM has grown to be the universal term to describe any unwanted, unethical, or unproductive activity performed on the Internet. In the case of bulk email marketing, SPAM is any unsolicited commercial or junk email.

Commercial email does have its benefits for both businesses and consumers. However, many individuals and companies have abused the technology of the Internet so much that almost all commercial email is referred to as SPAM, whether it meets the actual definition or not. Because of that, bulk email marketing can be very dangerous for your business.

Getting labeled as a “SPAMMER” can get your business in a whole lot of trouble. It can get all of your company’s email addresses blocked from sending any email of any kind to entire email networks (AOL, MSN, YAHOO, etc.). It can get your site blocked by those networks as well. It can get your site banned from the search engines. Finally, it can get your site kicked off of your host’s servers.

All it takes for any of those possibilities to happen is a small number of vocal people to complain about you to their ISP, to the search engines, or to your host and your business will be ruined. SPAM is a big deal to many ISPs and groups because they view it as an unnecessary nuisance to their customers and also as a costly waste of their bandwidth.

With this information in mind you should really think twice before you send out any advertisements using email. There are many companies online that sell lists of thousands of email addresses claiming that the owners have knowingly and freely “opted-in” to receive unsolicited emails. They sell those addresses for pennies each and suggest conversion rates for them as high 30%.

Our advice to you is don’t be fooled. The consequences of that kind of bulk email marketing far out way any potential reward. Just don’t do it. Everything you may have heard about how effective or beneficial bulk email marketing through bought lists can be is just hype created by rip-off artists who aim to make easy money from the uninformed.

The only legitimate email marketing you can and should be doing is to the people who have bought something directly from you or requested more information directly from you before. That is the only list of people it is safe for you to send marketing email to because you can prove that you had some kind of relationship with them before you sent them your advertisement. If anyone accuses you of anything improper you can just show them an order receipt or an email request to prove your innocence.

There are still limits to how frequently you should send marketing email to your personal opt-in list. Just because you have one doesn’t mean you can or should send to it every day. Once a month at the most is fine. Just make sure that you remove anyone from your list who requests to not receive your emails.

The first “don’t” we see many people make is that they don’t do any website planning at all. Without a basic, clear plan about how your website will be organized and function it will take you longer to complete it, make it harder for you to accomplish your goals, and will make it difficult for your visitors to find what they are looking for. Start your website planning with a diagram like the one below that shows how your pages will be organized.

When you start to build your site and add information and products to it do it one page at a time, completing each page as much as possible as you go. If your site will have more than 5 pages don’t create those pages in your site’s directory until you are ready to work on them. The more pages your site has the longer it will take you to complete them all and the longer it will take you to “go live”. Start with just a few pages and a handful of products or articles and that way you can start to put your site to work for you a lot sooner as you build it up.

Websites are never totally finished. There is always updating that needs to be done and fine tuning to get the best search engine listings. Having a feature rich website full of many pages of products and valuable information is exactly what your visitors and the search engines like to see and that should definitely be your long term goal. But we?ve seen many people give up on their dream because they never get their site complete enough to take full advantage of it. If your site is a mess, disorganized, and full of empty pages more than likely it will be a failure. Start small and get it actively working for you as soon as possible in a professional and effective manner. Web site planning is only the first step.

Choose your colors carefully and keep in mind that your tastes may not be appealing to your target audience. Try a few different color schemes and ask some of your friends or family for their opinions about them. And remember this term, “white-space”. In general, white-space is the cornerstone of good website design. Keep the background areas where your information or products will be displayed white or another light / pale color. Dark or oddly colored backgrounds distract your visitors from your information and also can make it difficult to read. Background images are also a big don’t for the same reasons plus they make your pages load more slowly. Colored text should also be used sparingly. Contrast is key, otherwise it can be very difficult to read. Here’s an example. Try to use colored text only to emphasize important information. If you choose to use a color other than black throughout your site make sure it is dark.

The layout is how things are arranged on your pages. There are many different ways to display your content and we’ll cover that a bit farther down the page. What we’re going to discuss here are the elements that frame your content such as your navigation menu buttons, any graphical accents, logos, etc.

The name of your website, domain name, or business name should be prominently featured somewhere at or near the top of your pages either within your logo or near it. And it should fit within the typical boundaries of the page. If you make it too big or it contains too many words then it will stretch your pages so wide that most visitors won’t be able to see the whole page unless they scroll sideways. Very annoying, and definitely not good website design. More about this later.

The placement of the navigation buttons or links of a website are usually placed in one of 3 different areas of the page. Across the top of each page or down the left or right side. The eBizWebpages.com Site Builder also allows you to automatically include a second set of navigational links at the bottom of all your pages. Regardless of where you choose to put them try to keep the text on the buttons or in the links as short as possible. Anything longer than one or two words will cause that part of your layout to be too wide and crowd your content area.

Where your navigation buttons or links appear on your pages should be decided by the number of main or primary pages you will have in your website. Primary pages are the pages organized just below your home page in the structure or diagram of your website.

In general, you can only fit up to 8 buttons (maybe less depending on how much text you use) across the top of your pages and if you choose that layout then how the subpage page links are displayed also may have a limitation. Some layouts with top page primary page buttons will also display subpage links in a second row across the top and others will display them down the left side of the page.

Navigation buttons down either side of your pages don’t run into any limitations due to the endless amount of vertical space on every page. Remember though that the amount of text on the buttons will greatly affect the amount of space for content.

Two Design is paramount.
When you meet someone for the first time, you want to make a good first impression. The same should be true for your Web site. The overall look and feel of the site is the first thing your visitors notice. That is why all the sites we create look professional and attractive

Three Navigation should be intuitive.
There are few things more frustrating than not being able to find what you are looking for on a Web site. Pages should be well-organized with a top-down design so that people can easily browse to where they want to go on your site.

Four Consistency is key.
Visitors shouldn’t feel like they have been sent to a completely different Web site each time they open a new page on your site. Most people are accustomed to familiar layouts within Web sites. Consistency among the pages on your site makes navigation a much easier task.

Five Color choice is critical.
Color selection can make or break a site. Most of us know what it is like to visit a site that is just painful to look at. When choosing colors, it is important to be consistent, choose colors that don’t clash, and make sure there is a strong contast between the text and the background. White is the safest choice for a background color, but other colors can work.

Six Don’t forget the content.
Even if your site has an amazing design, it will not be productive if it lacks content. There needs to be enough content on each page to make visiting it worthwhile. If a page is extremely long, it may be a good idea to break it up into smaller ones.

Seven Make use of the full browser window.
People with large monitors typically don’t like seeing all the content of a Web page crammed into one tenth of their screen. Most sites created by Sharpened Productions scale to fill the browser window so that people with monitors of all sizes can make the most out of their screen real estate. If you need to use a fixed size, you can count on most visitors using a resolution of at least 1024×768.

Eight Develop for multiple browsers.
Despite what Microsoft would like you to believe, not everybody on the Web uses Internet Explorer on a Windows-based PC. That is why we check our sites in multiple browsers on multiple platforms — to make sure everything appears uniformly. It is always best to catch problems ahead of time instead of relying on visitor complaints.

Nine Check the site for errors.
As any experienced editor will tell you, a wonderful piece of work can be greatly tarnished by a single small error. For websites, this includes typos, broken links, and images that do not show up correctly. Sharpened Productions is meticulous when editing your site.

Ten Write your own code.
Though we typically use Adobe GoLive to create your page layout, we also follow and edit the HTML that is being generated. When it comes to Web scripting, we write everything from scratch. While some people tend to grab pre-written scripts for every action they need, they are clueless when something goes wrong or doesn’t work. It is also easier to customize the code we write, allowing us to avoid the “template appearance” of many other sites on the Web.