This article will cover just the basics of putting a search engine friendly Web site live on the Internet. In later articles, we will go into more depth on how to get high search rankings. So let's begin our lesson. First, you need to rent a good domain name. You'll need to find a good registrar for that and we highly recommend GoDaddy.com. To make it easier to get high rankings down the road, your domain name should have the *name of your main product or service* in it. Your domain name should be short also so that it will be easy for people to remember. Preferably you should rent a dot-com domain name; but that isn't always possible.

If you don't know HTML then find a good Web Designer that knows how to create search engine friendly websites. A lot of Web designers use too much code (code bloat) to design their pages. Also many use a lot of on page JavaScript which some search spiders still have a difficult time in crawling. Meaning the search spider could just end up leaving your page and not crawling much of your site. Also, most designers don't even bother to validate the code they are using. You run the risk of having your pages not all render properly in all the various browsers.

Basically, search engine ranking algorithims are programmed to rank pages higher that search engine project fast, are easy to crawl, are well designed, have NO coding errors and use proper coding practices. For instance the code that is actually used must match the

Once the website is "done" (Web sites are NEVER done), find a good web hosting company. It's important that your website be up and running 100% of the time, so don't skimp on your web host. Also, spend a little extra money and get a *dedicated* IP address so that your site is not sharing the same IP with hundreds of other Web sites, some of which could be spam sites or sites using black hat SEO which could end up getting your site banned from Google even though you didn't do anything wrong.

While there is some anecdotal evidence that letting Googlebot find your Web pages on its own, it is still a good idea to submit your home or index page to the various search engines. Also, you should submit your site to the top paid directories such as Yahoo!, Business.com and Best of the Web. You should also submit your site to DMOZ also known as the Open Directory Project or just ODP for short. It's free to submit to DMOZ but it can take forever to get your site reviewed and it isn't automatic that your site will be listed. So getting listed in the top directories will take you a long ways towards getting some decent search engine rankings.