Newbie question on how to rank?

Hello Greige, first off, it's a pleasure to meet you. Secondly, good luck on your new venture. It's a great time to get into web development. If you have the skills, it's a great market!

In regards to your question, hopefully I can give you some information based on my experience.

When making a website make sure you are always thinking: Can the customer easily contact this client? Is the phone number easy to find; is there a quick contact form, if possible, is there a Click-2-Call button? If they are selling a product, can they do this quickly? Amazing, awesome, spectacular designs are great, but remember... the visitors wants a website that is easy to navigate. Your client wants the visitor to contact them or purchase a service.

Knowing that always make a website with optimization in mind. You can have the best website on the Internet, but if no one finds it; does it matter? The typical standard practices: Title, Meta, Content, Links etc...

Once the website is up, I always go after these key notes:

• Social Networking: Twitter and FaceBook can be a huge traffic generator. I normally integrate the two and run automated posts through HootSuite.com. Drum up attention and focus on getting friends and followers. Don't be afraid to put the FaceBook Graph on your website so people can see your site is becoming popular.

• Backlinks: Still important... Relevant backlinks from various websites such as web2.0, article sites, PR sites, social bookmark, social networking etc... Some say backlink your backlinks; some don't do it. I personally do it, and from my experience it works.

• Don't ignore YouTube; one of the most visited websites on the Internet. Create some videos, get them views; get attention. Link your YouTube to Twitter. Create a nice 3-way social cirus. YouTube ---> Twitter ----> FaceBook.

It's getting late, so I have to wrap this up. Good luck with you new venture, and I do hope it works out for you. Hopefully other people will post to you also; lots of great information is on this forum.

I just checked out the Hootsuite website, that's a really useful tool I gotta really say! Thanks for the useful tips, asiriusthoth! means a whole to me! and thanks for the good luck! I am really gonna need it, I am so nervous right now.

Greige - there is one thing that is true for SEO. Content. Targeted content.

As a background to the above, excellent advice from asiriusthoth:

One page = one topic, one audience. Different audience? Different page. Different topic? Different page. Each is unique, each is targeted. They will rank higher just for that. Oh, and keep your writing style simple and elegant, that way people don't have to struggle with long words.

Backlinks - think traffic. Targeted traffic that finds what it wants. This is Google's gold standard now. Not the quantity of backlinks the quality - ie the traffic they generate. Too many people are still living in pre-Panda. Social media fits in here by getting readers interested.

You don't need SEO, you don't need backlinks. You need good quality traffic that brings you money.

Hope this helps, Moriarty