Many people believe that as soon as you publish a website then millions of people will immediately visit it.  In reality putting up a website and waiting for people to visit it is like installing a new phone and waiting for it to ring with new orders.

No one is going to visit your website unless you or someone else tells them about it and gives people a reason to come.

When you register your domain then it will get picked up by Google and the other search engines and put on the list of sites for the spiders to index.  So within a couple of weeks your site will appear in Google search results.  However, how it will be listed and ranked is all up to Google; you have little control over how they catalog your site.  Sometimes the only way to find your sites is by searching on the domain name.

However, there are some things you can do to encourage search engines to list your site under different terms that people search for.  This is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

When you talk about search engine ranking there are two things to consider:

1. What did the searcher type in the search engine query box (the search term)?
2. Your site’s ranking for that search term

There is no such as a #1 ranking on Google.  When you go to www.Google.com all you see is the Google logo, an empty text box, and a “Google Search” button.  You don’t get any results until you type something and click the button.

For example, my personal website, www.RayWampler.com is the #1 ranked site in Google when you search for “Ray Wampler.”  How many people type “Ray Wampler” in the Google search box each day?  Virtually none.  What are people searching for?  According to Google Insights for Search the top search term is “Facebook.”  And when you search for “Facebook” Google comes up with 17,060,000,000 results.  That’s 17 billion, not 17 million.  And guess what the #1 website in those results are? Duh! Facebook.com.

Probably neither “Facebook” nor “Ray Wampler” would be the best search terms for your own website.  The best terms for you depend on the goal for your website.

The keys to SEO are:

1. Deciding who you want to visit your site (target market)
2. Figuring out what they are searching for (search terms)
3. Getting your page ranked high for those search terms

Over the next several weeks and months I will cover these keys in a step-by-step process that you can follow to get your own website ranked high for the terms you want.  I will be using my own website, dbEasy.com, as an example.  I will chronicle everything I do to drive paying customers to my site for web database application services and openly share with you the results.  Hopefully we will both become successful in the process.