Website development is not magic, and it's not as difficult as some people would like you to believe. The many companies involved in SEO or Search Engine Optimization are correct in stating your site must be "optimized" for the search engines in order to get higher search engine rankings. What they would like you to believe is this is all very technical and sophisticated, and therefore it justifies the prices they charge for their services.

What is in fact highly technical, sophisticated and developed by absolute geniuses, are the search engine algorithms used to rank sites as the "bots" crawl the millions of sites and bring back information. But you need to understand one thing clearly. The search engines are ultimately looking for only one result - fresh content that will be exactly what people like you and I want when we do a search.

When I made my first attempts at website building, I researched everything I could about website development and how to get my website ranked in the top 10 and then using all the technical tricks and tools to make the search engines happy and rank my site high. You can guess what happened...nothing!

The only way you could find my site was for me to actually tell you my URL. Needless to say, I had very little traffic. Then it hit me, why am I trying to outsmart the brilliant people at the search engines who continue to update their search technology on a daily basis? I realized there has to be a better website development method, and went looking. Face it, with out the search engines ranking your site highly; all your work will be for nothing, because your site will be invisible!

I was very lucky to find a company name Site Build It. I signed up with them for $300, and it was the best investment I have made yet in my online adventures. The folks at SiteSell are always on the cutting edge of everything e-business. They've helped tens of thousands of people launch successful Web businesses with SBI!.

I went through their 10 day course and read every page and watched every video. They quickly pointed out the basic misconceptions people have about website development and building sites that are ranked highly by search engines and how to avoid them. What they made clear to me can be summed up in one phrase used often in their course..."content is king!"

You start your website development with a concept or theme, a subject you are passionate about, a subject you believe you can make into a business. Then you do keyword research about your subject to find out how much search activity there is about your subject on the search engines. You also look at what keywords have the highest search demand versus websites supplying that information, and the resulting gap or surplus. When you find gaps, this means there is demand for information about those keywords, and an opportunity for your concept.

Then you build content rich pages around those keywords, and guess what. That is exactly what the search engine algorithms and "bots" are looking for...CONTENT! But you must never forget the most important part of equation will be the humans that will be reading your pages, so as they say in the training - Keep it real! You must write as your having a conversation with someone sitting in front of you.

If website development is magic, then the magic boils down to three key principles.

• Your website must have a theme that you are knowledgeable and passionate about.

• You must understand you will never outsmart the search engines, and the search engines rankings are based on good content around a specific theme and keywords.

• You must keep your human readers in mind as your first priority and develop your content for them.

Keep these basic principles in site at all times and then, and only then, you will get the results you want -- traffic and increased sales!

That should be the main reason that you create a website so that it will work for you in your chosen endeavor. When you build a website it is important to understand what makes a website work.

Firstly when you go online in the research mode you type in a keyword relative to your question. Then a number of sites come up with content relative to that keyword. Then you visit a site and see if it contains the answers you seek.

The best sites are highly relevant to your search and provide content that addresses your needs. This content is laid out in a way that makes sense. Navigation is straight forward and there are few distractions. As a result you get the answers you seek and because it is presented logically in a way you can understand you relate to it and as a result you follow its recommendations.

This is exactly the way you want to build your website. Good content is king but not only that - content that is relevant and solution orientated rather that sales orientated will deliver better results. This way you become your visitor's friend and we all listen to our friends.

When people can understand and see results credibility develops. Then share a few secrets here and there and you will have a friend for life.

Get this right and you will build a website that will work for all parties concerned. This may sound a little complicated but it actually is not. We are all human beings and we have far more things in common than not. So observe how you use the internet and what your expectations are then you will understand what others expect.

To learn how to put all this together select any of the following links.

Like a lot of web developers, I'm not always that disciplined when it comes to the file naming convention I use and I sometimes end up with a situation whereby I have some files that are in lowercase, some that begin with a capital, and some that are a bit of a mixture.

One web site I maintain contains about 2000 web pages and has about 20,000 hyperlinks. As you can imagine, I had one of those sinking feelings when I was told that in order to migrate the web site to a new content management system, all the file names and hyperlinks would need to be changed to lowercase.

Whenever I am presented with a problem like this, my instinct is always to write a Perl script using one or more regular expressions to solve the problem. This particular situation was no exception.

Change a string to lowercase

The following regular expression changes all the characters in a string to lowercase. The first part of the regular expression finds a hyperlink, and the second part converts the string. (Just in case this article is not displayed correctly, there should be a single backslash in front of the 'L$1').

Change a filename to lowercase

Likewise, changing a filename itself is very simple. The following two lines perform the task quite nicely:

(Again, there should be a single backslash in front of the 'L$name'.)

If you need more information on how to incorporate the above code snippets into a complete script, feel free to contact me directly.