Top 10 Tips for a successful Internet presence

#3 Sitemap on site and for G & Y

Have a page where EVERY page of your site is linked to and explained for humans. Search engines love this BUT visitors may use it as well to get to specific pages fast!
If you have such a page convert it, open up a G account and install a sitemap for G. The same goes for Y (here its called site explorer). No it does not need to be xml. For small sites a text file is acceptable.

#4 Viral marketing - Recommend / Bookmark local / Social bookmark

If you wish to create a buzz about your site and services, how are people supposed to tell others?
Make it easy for them. Have a recommend to a friend on every page. Do you bookmark sites? Wouldn't it be nice to have a wee reminder and script doing this for you on a click?
Social media line. People submit or mark pages for their peers in an easy environment to share - Del.ico.us Facebook, Twitter spring to mind. Again make it easy - see below.

#5 Links - The red blood cells of the net

Well you can struggle and still have graveyard links pages, fForever checking and changing. Or you simply join a premier link / ad network. You show a couple of links on your pages (all or some) or you just buy the service, and it will show your link / ad on other sites pages. It's a one time install of a script and all the headache of updating and checking is gone.

The most advanced of these networks is ReceiveLinks.com where you can select categories wide or narrow.

#6 Long pages - Not a problem but....

Why do websites with pages beyond the fold expect me to scroll up when I'm finished reading / scanning?
My LapTop doesn't have a scroll mouse! Please, please give me a clickable Top of Page or a juicy link to click on. See one of our site as an example - Natural Asthma Remedy - Yamoa

#7 Tables, CSS I, CSS II, type setting etc etc etc

Make it simple and fast. Allow for the speed readers and the impaired. Long sentences are hard to read. Lots of flashing icons, colours and so on may look nice, but do you get the message across?

Well, you have made it down to here, thus I can assume that you are really interested in what I have to say. Now lets not destroy that relationship by using fancy graphics or changes in typo.
(This is more of a distraction than useful...)

#8 Consider advertising and sponsor ship

I have pages upon wich my direct competitor is advertising. He pays me for the privilege. So each month my sites make a small but fixed income to cover the basic costs. Do I loose visitors? Maybe, but I also give choice! Google's Adsense is as good as any and content rich pages will have valuable ads targeted. No don't plaster them all about, but why not show two ads on your pages? It may show you that the page is not correctly targeted as the ads do not fit. Would you have noticed?

#9 Keep on generating content - Blog - The easy way to do it

Once your core site is out there the real work starts. Launching is one goal achieved. Now you need to keep the interest going. Nothing attracts search engines as much as new content - incidentally the same goes for your real visitors. Newsletters is a nice thing but having a Blog is even easier. Just keep updating regularly not necessarily daily but regularly. A Blog once implemented (like wordpress) allows you and fellow writers to explore areas beyond the core of your business. It also allows to simply generate more pages if you so wish.

#10 Don't assume all your visitors enter by the front door - allow for it

Not all your visitors will enter by the front door. Specifically when your site is established and may target more than just one single item or service. It is very likely that different pages of your site position differently for various search phrases. One of my travel sites has about 15.000 pages out there and presently these are found by 6.500 different key phrases. Virtually noone enters by the "homepage" and that is fine by me. Doing so, in this case it would require extra clicks.