Basic SEO and Web Design Guide

How to create a website, how to make your website visible on search engines, how to create traffic to your website and how to rank well in search engines.

• Do you have plans to create your own website?

• Do you know the fundamentals to build a website?

• Do you want your site to be found in search engines?

• Do you know the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

• And do you have a small budget?
  
  This online guide will get you through all the steps you have to make before- and after launching your web site
  and.......this information is all free. No cheap sales tricks to urge you to buy something, no signup needed, no send-your-email request (so, no spamming!).

This basic guide is about self serve (organic) Search Engine Optimization (SEO), basic web design, writing SEO copy and choosing a web host. I will show and explain you the basic guidelines to create a website that you can submit to major search engines, in such a way that search engines will really find your website. I also will explain you how you can speed up your website visibility by using a low budget advertisement program, like Adwords from Google. You all can do this for the price of a dinner-for-two budget a month.

Building a website is not difficult. You can download a copy of some free web building software package, pick a nice template, start creating your homepage, add some pictures and add some extra pages and...ready! But then what?

You probably have heard about meta tags, keywords, keyword rich content, anchor text, linking and more words like that, but do you know what they mean?
You will understand their meaning after reading this SEO guide, you also will be able to create a search engine friendly website, which will be easy accessible for your future visitors and search engine crawlers.

In case you are curious why I have created this website, please read a little bit about Bart Dirks

Why this basic SEO guide?

Most large commercial companies have a website. Their (IT) organization has or hires employees like, a web developer, web designer, graphic designer, webmaster, site manager, content suppliers, text-editors, (web) marketing managers and site promoters, or they have let it do for them by professional web design- and SEO companies. In any way, such companies have better (financial) opportunities to create and promote a website then most individuals or small business companies have. In your case you probably have to to do this all alone, using your single PC, HTML-editor and a graphic software like Photoshop. This means that you need to have a lot of different skills to reach the ultimate goal; 'get a prominent position/ranking in the major Search Engines (SE's)'.

Sounds hopeless? No, it isn't, because if I can do it, you can do it too. I also started once with a personal website and got interested in organic SEO. So I started reading, subscribed to some good SEO newsletters, visit specific SEO forums and bought some books about SEO and one of the most important things, I visit and analyze the websites of my competitors. The only problem is (for me it is a challenge) that the development in the 'SEO-world' never stops, you have to keep yourself up with the developments of the major search engines and directories (indexes) and keep yourself up-to-date by reading prominent articles and regular visit SEO forums.
But remember that all information you need to learn about SEO is free on the web. You only need to know where to find it.

For this reason I have published for you this self serve basic SEO guide. I call it 'self serve' because you can promote your site by yourself and I call it 'basic' because this guide contents all the basics you must know to make your website SE- and human-visitor friendly, before submitting it to the SE's and indexes.