Designing a website can be a daunting task if you’re new to the game and have little time to research the proper ways to develop a site that is both user and search engine friendly. After all, what good is a website if no one can find you? Below are some things to avoid if search engine traffic is a priority.
Frames are pages within a page. Search engine crawlers, spiders, or bots read a frameset as one page with very little content. Just because you can’t see the frames distinctly when viewing a page online doesn’t mean the search spider sees the site as a human does. If you want to see the site as a crawler does, right click on the main area of the page in question and view the source code of that page. You must avoid frames especially for main/home pages of a site.
Flash is a very cool and hip way to do a page as it can incorporate interactivity and entertainment into a site or page, but it has little value to a search crawler. But the fact is a search crawler cannot read flash page or component so all of that content and interlinking you worked so hard to develop earns you nothing in terms of search value. Your viewers may love your site, but you’re unlikely to attract new viewers without the help of the search engines. One caveat: it’s okay to mix in some Flash, but stay away from pure Flash for your website if your goal is to attract the masses.

Search crawlers can’t execute lines of code therefore they won’t be able to navigate your site if you implement a lot of Java script to guide users. The purpose of a crawler is to inventory a website to report back to the engine what it found. Once the search engine has a pretty good inventory of a site, it can mix that site in with the search engine results pages for a given keyword phrase. Try to make the crawler’s job as easy as possible by limiting the amount of scripting navigation per page. If you insist on using scripting for navigation, make sure you have some form of HTML navigation visible as well. At worst, have an HTML link on each page to an accurate site map for your site.

Most search engines will not list dynamic URLs in their results pages. Dynamic URLs are typically used for database driven sites or script based sites. The above paragraph outlines the reasoning behind avoiding scripts, and dynamic URLs are no different. If you must use dynamic URLs, try to have a main page that doesn’t so that the search engines can find you.
Search crawlers frequently get stuck within image maps and can’t accurately inventory your site. Stick with standard HTML navigation schemes if at all possible. When designing your site, keep in mind that it needs to be easy to navigate for users and search engine crawlers alike. A slick site is of little use if no one can find you especially a search engine crawler.

Meta Tags - They’re Back!!

In the beginning of search engine optimization, there were meta tags.

That beginning line of code on websites that began with and closed with was the perfect place to list all of the pertinent keywords related to your site. Search engines would then use this to help determine where to rank the page. Sadly, spammers quickly learned to abuse this useful piece of coding, and search engines began to ignore them.

The good news…. they’re back!

Many of the primary search engines are beginning to factor in meta tags once again, along with several other factors to help determine a page’s ranking. Thanks to new algorithms used for ranking, spammers are no longer able to manipulate their page’s ranking so easily.

So, how do I use meta tags exactly?

As mentioned, meta tags are those beginning lines of code between the open and close tags. Even though meta tags are invisible to web viewers, they contain important information about your website. “Keyword” tags are used to identify the relevant words and phrases that should lead Internet users to your site, and the “description” tags are used to further describe what your website content is about. With this in mind, here are five suggestions to follow when creating your meta tags:

1. Meta tags should be different for each of your website’s pages. You don’t have the exact same content on each of your pages, so it makes sense that each page’s meta tags should be different as well.

2. Your meta tags should focus on what information is really on your page. Don’t waste your time trying to fool the search engines.

3. Separate your keywords with a comma only - no spaces.

4. When deciding which keywords to put first, place the most relevant words at the start of the tag.

5. When writing your description tag, use complete sentences and include your most relevant keywords and phrases.

Some webmasters, thinking meta tags were dead, have erroneously removed them from their source code. Don’t make this same mistake! Thanks to new ranking algorithms countering spammers who’ve abused the meta tag system, meta tags have returned as an important piece of the search engine optimization puzzle.

Social Networking, Web 2.0 

Social networking and web 2.0 are actually obscure terms. It comes in many shapes and sizes. You may have heeded these terms bandied about; wondering what exactly they are and what they mean for your business.

So let’s dig right in and make a clearer picture about social networking and web 2.0.
Since people buy from people they like, know and trust; engaging with and empowering your customers as an extension of your marketing efforts isn’t new. However, over time, there are new tools and philosophies to more effectively listen and engage with customers. So social networking using Web 2.0 techniques has become a fabulous business internet strategy.

Web 2.0 cover forums, blogs, online profiles, networking, document publishing sites, online videos, social book marking etc. It describes the transition of the internet from flat, static, standalone Web sites into a participative, adaptive, consumer-centric medium. Using Web 2.0 in social networking allows you to cultivate a more significant community, enhance your brand, build relationships and create evangelists along the way.
Different social networks have sprung up – catered in different languages and countries. Social networks such as Myspace, Facebook, Orkut and many more are a great way to get your ideas and products in front of a lot of eyeballs. There are also sites built by business people for business people – where entrepreneurs connect with one another, create business networking events, create business groups, ask and get business advice from global entrepreneurs, find business resources, f business partners, post business classified and post business jobs. 

List of Example of Social Networks
http://360.yahoo.com

http://spaces.live.com

http://www.MySpace.com

http://www.orkut.com

http://www.facebook.com

http://www.hi5.com

http://www.friendster.com

http://www.fotolog.com

http://www.livejournal.com

http://www.bebo.com

http://www.xanga.com

http://www.multiply.com

http://www.linkedin.com

http://www.piczo.com

http://www.last.fm

http://www.stumbleupon.com

http://www.broadcaster.com

http://www.gaiaonline.com

http://www.mybloglog.com

http://www.squidoo.com

http://my.opera.com/community/

http://www.buzznet.com

http://www.imvu.com

http://www.twitter.com

http://www.slashdot.org

http://www.wayn.com

Strategies that will help you maintain your website position in the search engines

Do not get relaxed after getting indexed in the search engine results, there is so much to do afterwards to maintain the position of your website in the search results. Here are some of the important tips that would help you maintain your website’s position in the search engines:

1. Keep updating your blog or website at least twice a day, you can do that by posting two articles of 200 words as it does not take much time to write a 200 words article, make sure all posts are strictly related to your website/blo

2. Avoid keyword stuffing, as per experts from Google; too much stuffing of keywords may ban your website from search engine results permanently.

3. Keep changing Meta tags, title tags and descriptions of your website, as most of the search engines take these things into consideration while indexing a website to their listings

4. Submit your URL to free directories at least twice a month to ensure that your site stays in to the search engines.

5. Follow the Google guidelines as most of the search engines rely big time on Google for search results.

All the hard work that you do to create a good website goes in vain, if you do not receive the amount of traffic that you wish to. If you have very well constructed website do not let it fail, follow these simple and instant ways to attract plenty of visitors daily:

1. The best of the lot is by adding your website in the form of signature to the bottom of every email that you send, you can do that by selecting add signature option from email preferences tab.

2. Commenting on blogs is another very good way to receive instant traffic, but make sure you give honest and spam free comments, as comments go through moderation process.

3. Create social profile on social networking sites like Facebook or Orkut etc. Add your website to your profile and take part in active discussions, you are bound to receive visitors if you initiate worthy topics on the social networking sites, plenty of users use this strategy to increase the traffic to their site.

4. Search for blogs or websites related to your website content and ask them to exchange links, doing so will surely get more visitors to your site.