In essence: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it–and these days that means putting in a lot. It is much more difficult to get good search engine rankings and attract and keep quality visitors. Also, design elements are getting much more sophisticated and require more specialized skills to implement.

As the owner of a new website, you can expect to do or pay for a lot more writing of content, quality inbound link building, and attracting visitors and links through blogs, social sites, and other Web 2.0 techniques.

Content: You may have heard the expression, “Content is king.” This is true, the more content you have on your website, the more fodder there is for the search engines to chew on; the more you are able to emphasize your key search words and terms and the more likely you are to be considered an “authority” and thus attract links from other websites.

Link Building: In bound links from other websites that are older, have more Page Rank, are of a related subject, and are respected by the search engines, are the best way to increase your rankings in the search engines. It is a lot of work, but well worth it. Google is becoming a lot more discriminatory on how it places value on links from one site to another. So one good quality in bound link, may be worth dozens of low quality extraneous links. Paid links are a no-no. Some directories charge a fee to review your site before inclusion–those are OK, but going to a link farm and paying to have 500 links created to your site is a waste of time. The search engines will most likely just ignore them. Trading links is OK as long as you do it with a site that is related in subject to your site.

Blogging: If you create a blog that you contribute to regularly (daily or weekly**), you will have the opportunity to create good fresh relevant content and links to interior pages on your site. If your blog posts are good and interesting, you may create comments on other people’s blogs and sites, that in return creates more in bound links.

Web 2.0: Then there are all the social sites, Youtube, Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, Flikr, etc. Any content you can create on these sites can enhance the visibility, traffic, and links to your site.

All of these techniques take a great deal of effort. But remember, there are people out there doing these things, and they are your competitors in both the search engines and in visitors. So let’s all get to work.

Video on websites is becoming more prevalent and necessary. We recently ran across a software company that makes it very easy and inexpensive to add a Flash video player to your website. For about $50 they offer three programs that are easy to install on your computer and very intuitive to run. There is a program to convert your video into .flv format (Flash video, that is so widely used), another to create the player, and a third that will produce a multi-video player if you have more than one video you want to offer using the same player. We highly recommend them. EasyFLV.com

I got an email from a woman that started off, “Will you be totally honest with me - How many websites do you know that are making money online?” She went on to explain that she had spent a lot of money creating a website that was now a year old where she sold her hand made greeting cards. My friends, this is not the web of 1998. Back in the late 90’s one could put up a site and if it was reasonably done, it could get attention, traffic, and make sales. Those days are over. It now takes a great deal of time, talent, and know-how (especially in the area of Search Engine Optimization) to create a successful site that will make money.

This earnest and eager woman did all that she thought was necessary, but  did not know enough about  SEO and web marketing to get her site noticed. I now highly recommend to anyone who has plans to create an e-commerce website themselves to spend a few months studying SEO. Go to the SEO online forums everyday and read all the post. This is where you will find other people like yourself who are looking for advice and knowledge from people who are in that field. At first it will be confusing and perhaps frustrating, but after a month the learning curve will soften and you will “see the light”. You will say, “Oh, now I get it.” Once you do, it will make sense, and you can start building your site.