When going online, few people give much thought to all the aspects of running an online business. But in order to be among the 5% of the businesses that still run after their first year, you need to keep a few things in mind.

Know your target market

In order to create something that people would love to buy and use, you need to know your target market. To do this, you can:

• be an expert in your industry

• read websites in the industry, such as blogs, forums, social sites, etc

• ask your friends about your product idea, what they think, what they would suggest, etc

In this article, I’m going to show you step-by-step how to create search engine optimized Titles and META Tags.

The TITLE Element

TITLE elements, (commonly called TITLE Tags), are one of the most important factors that search engines “look” at when it comes to determining the relevancy of a web page against a search query. In their ranking algorithms, nearly all the major search engines attribute a high relevancy weíght to the content of the TITLE tag.

In the HTML code of a web site, TITLE tags look like this one (for a fictional florist):

One of the most telling things you can do in any business is study your competitors. Your competition can reveal weakness in your business and open your eyes to new opportunities in your industry. The same is true in the web world, and with search engine optimization in particular. Why does your competitor consistently rank higher than you for important terms? What programming, content, and link building strategies are they using to help attain those rankings? Answer those questions and you’ll be one step closer to out-ranking them and bringing that traffic and those sales to your site.

One of the most important aspects of a search engine optimization project is also one of the most overlooked – preparation! There are some important steps to take in advance of optimizing your site that will make sure your SEO is successful.

Before You Start

Before you start any search engine optimization campaign, whether it’s for your site or that belonging to a client, you need to answer the following questíons:

1) What is the overall motivation for optimizing this site? What do I/they hope to achieve? e.g. more sales, more subscribers, more traffíc, more publicity etc.

Those much-revered top five placements on search engines for a given set of keywords only draws the viewer’s attention for seven seconds. Gord Hotchkiss sees this short attention span as a call to brands to keep doing their market research.

The humorous Short Attention Span Theater of Comedy Central’s earlier days condensed comedy bits into brief pieces slightly longer than a commercial break. Fifteen years ago it was just a funny idea. These days the short amount of time needed to watch them would be a huge obstacle to the typical Internet surfer.

WNW Design is proud to announce the launch of Downers Dish Hire’s new website, offering hire of catering supplies for all kinds of events and parties.

Downers Dish Hire offer a wide range of services from cutlery, dishes and crockery, beverages, buffets and service, plus an after-event washing up service. The company’s new website offers the chance to add items to a Wishlist and then submit this for a quote and approval of availability. You can see their new website here: http://www.downersdishhire.co.uk

Google is by far the most important search engine on the net. To rise to the top of their search engine, you need to improve your link popularity and you need to understand how they measure your link popularity (over 50% of all search engine traffic comes from Google, and if you can rise to the top, you will likely rise to the top of all the other search engines as well).

Use Your Paid Search for Optimization Hints

Google, MSN and Yahoo are all in the advertising business. Make no mistake. They generate BILLIONS in annual profíts from the sale of advertising on their search engines. The pay-per-click marketplace is huge and growing almost daily.

Each month companies large and small use pay-per-click advertising to generate traffíc to their site. All those little clicks add up to be huge revenue for the search engines and can be a huge line item on a company’s Profit and Loss Statement.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the optimization of a web page in order that it ranks higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) for specific keywords or keyword phrases. The pages that rank higher typically gain the greater amount of search engine traffic compared to pages ranked lower for the same keyword.

The majority of web users click on one of the top 5 results on the first page when they complete a search. As such, the ultimate goal of any SEO (Search Engine Optimizer) is to gain one of these coveted top spots, with the number one ranking being the primary objective.

In this article, I’m going to try and debunk a few myths floating around the Internet about what’s required to get your site visible in search engines. Here goes:

Myth 1 - You need to buy a domain with keywords in it

I’m sure you’ve seen them, domains like: www.paris-hilton-pink-diamond-dog-collars.com. For some weird reason, webmasters seem to think that they need to have a keyword-stuffed domain to do well in the search engines, the more hyphens the better. Well it just isn’t true.