Some people say that using a splash page as your home page is a bad idea. And that's true. You shouldn't use a splash page as your home page for search engine optimization purposes. Search engines love content, and having a splash page as your home page defeats your purpose of ranking well in the search engines, if that is one of your goals.

A splash page actually is a good idea - if you don't use it as your home page.

For example, a splash page on a traffic exchange is an excellent strategy and it's actually one of the best ways to eke out results from traffic exchanges.

You can set your splash page as an extension. For example, yourdomain.com/splash.html. Then use that for appropriate marketing channels. A splash page works well to get a visitor interested in a site because it's consistent two-step marketing. Get someone to do something, and he is likely to follow-up on whatever you tell him to do next!

So go and create a simple splash page now and use it for marketing channels like traffic exchanges, classified ads, pay per click ads etc. Splash pages are uncannily effective when the situation calls for something less cluttered and more attention grabbing. For the traffic sources mentioned above, splash pages definitely fit the mold.

Hire a graphic designer to create a snazzy graphic for you to use on your splash page. After all, the goal of your page is to capture immediate attention! You can even create a simple Flash movie or even include a video there.

Page titles

To help obtain high page rankings with search engines, the contents of your page title are one of the most important things that need to be dealt with. The page title is the first amount of information provided to a search engine describing the contents of the page. You should also be aware that the page title provides information about the contents not only to search engines, but to visitors as well. The page title will show up at the top of the browser window. Your page title should include your keywords and should be no longer than 60 characters long. If it is too long, your visitor will only see the first part. An easy way to figure out the length of a page title is to type it into a word processor that contains a word count feature. Since your page title needs to be a certain length, it is important to make the best use of the space, and although some words that are not key, will use up that valuable space, the title itself still needs to make sense. A keyword in your title can be repeated, but having the same words more than two times is not recommended. Compare your page title to others and see what makes their content look appealing enough to catch a potential visitor's eyes. Your page title needs to stand out between the other nine titles on the search engine results page. As you design your site, remember the fact that visitors may be directed to somewhere other than the homepage because the search engine believes it is the best match for a keyword. With this in mind, all pages of your website should be considered unique and have their own title.

Meta tags

For your site to be effective, you need to develop Meta tags. These tags are a site description and a keyword list. It is important to note that not all search engines use these Meta tags. Starting with your home page, you will need to insert two Meta tags. The first is a Meta description sentence and the second is a Meta keyword list. The information you put here is for search engines to use when they review your site. This review process is known as crawling and is done with a program called a spider or robot. The description tag serves two purposes. The spiders search it for keywords and it is also displayed to a surfer as they view search engine results. The information obtained by the spiders is kept in a database that is used when a person types in a query to a search engine. When you create your Meta keyword list, order them from the most relevant to the least. The first part of your list should contain the keywords that best describe your site and are unique enough that when someone does a search, there is not a large amount of competition to go up against. Make sure that all the keywords used in the description tags are again listed. The words at the end of your list are known as wildcards and include synonyms and words that could have been spelled wrong when someone was doing a search. During your Meta tag creation process, do not be afraid to go to other people's websites and see what they have used. Type in the same words you would like to include in your lists and see what the search engines display. This is a very good way to help determine your competition.

So, you've bought your domain, got some hosting. Now what? You need to make sure that your web site is as friendly as possible to the search engines so that they send you some traffic. This process is called "search engine optimization" or SEO for short. It is probably the most important - and most neglected - part of web site development.

Here are some tips to help your SEO web site development.

1. Don't use frames

Frames may help you to control the layout of your site but they are a nightmare as far as the search engine robots are concerned and will make it difficult for your site to be crawled by the search engine spiders.

2. Make sure there's text on your pages

This even goes for the page featuring that expensive Flash movie that you're currently forcing visitors to your site to watch (or more likely press the "skip intro" link). Search engines don't know what's written on images or animations. They can only read text (the images search is their best guess based on the text on the page and the video search is based on the description of the video). So make sure they have text to read!

3. Separate style and content

This means using CSS as much as possible to control the layout of your pages. That way the spider can read more of your content if all the "this is how it should look" stuff is self contained in its own CSS file. The biggest snag with this is that CSS needs to be really well written if it is to look nice at different screen sizes, on different browsers and with varying amount of text on the page. Test at least in Internet Explorer and Firefox and play around with the width of the browser to see how well or badly your site copes.

4. Use a title tag

HTML design programs are good at putting in really generic titles such as "Page 1" or "Home Page" but they're almost certainly not what you want the search engines to think your site is about. Change the title to something meaningful. If possible make your title catchy and make sure it's short enough to be completely displayed when the search engine results are shown. This is basic SEO but you'd be amazed how many people don't do it.

5. Put in a meta description tag

Despite what you may read, the description tag is useful. It isn't often taken into account when Google or whoever decide which results to show, which is why some people say it isn't important. But it's normally used as the extract that's shown below the blue clickable link to your site. So if it says "XYZ home page constructed with Dreamweaver" instead of something interesting, that's what will likely show up below your title. And if it's blank, you're giving the search engines free reign to put whatever they want there.

6. Keep it simple

Spiders like simple. Despite all the advances in the internet, they're fairly dumb and the easier you make it for them to understand what your site is about, the more they will reward you.