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!

Looking for a way to attract more attention to your website? Offer a fresh face and new content on a regular basis and you'll find people will check back to see what's new and you'll have a tool to measure what attracts and what doesn't. Here's how to do it.

Your website homepage is your front door through which online browsers come to visit your business. Static, never-changing content is no more interesting to a returning visitor than a book they have already read. To keep your audience captivated and coming back you need to make your home on the web inviting and interesting.

Present a Dynamic Home Page

One way that you can present changing home page content is to design ten to twelve unique pages with different content and then rotate them every month. Take a couple of weeks to design different ideas and images. Create page promotions that include a message that is timeless or that has a seasonal or timely announcement such as "Holiday Specials." When you consider different features for your home page and when it should be placed you're forced to look closely at at your marketing strategy over a one year period. This will save you a lot of time since you then won't have to think about your content through the year. It also allows you to plan your offers and gather the necessary content.

A web developer can put your home pages on a rotating script or use an automatic timer. You can then rotate your home pages to highlight a new tip every month or to promote a featured product. The home page of your website is much like the front cover of a magazine. People want to see a home page that has different photos and content at least every month, preferably every week. You won't want all of the content of your website to be featured on the page as this will overwhelm your website visitors. So choose one or two features to highlight each month. The rest of your website content should be well organized within the rest of the pages of your site. When you're ready to update your home page you simply grab content from your internal pages. This way you're not having to create new content. You're just reorganizing your existing content so that it feels new to your visitors.

Don't Change Your Home Page Too Often:

Even though you want your website to be new and dynamic you also don't want to change it too often. People take comfort from their favorite websites and want them to be familiar. If you change your home page too often or too much you may create confusion or give people the feel that someone else has taken over your site. You could also compromise your positioning in search engines. So maintain some consistency.

When you make changes to graphics or content it shouldn't make a major change to the way your website looks and feels. Regular visitors should be able to find the same information that they've always found on your home page and in the same place. As a rule, the headers and navigation tools on your page shouldn't ever change without a complete redesign and announcing that to your visitors. Change content and images with other content and images while maintaining the sites original functionality. Home pages that are consistent lend a feeling of comfort to users. If your customers learn to expect consistency they'll also learn to rely on your quality customer service. If you're a small online business, gaining your customer's trust is your most important step to success.

The Benefits of a Flexible Home Page

A flexible home page lets you test your off line marketing efforts. Before you spend money on a magazine or newspaper ad you can test it out on your website. You'll be able to see how people react to the ad. It will let you determine which featured products attract the most interest. You can also determine which graphics generate the most attraction. Web analytics software (Google Analytics is great and free to use) can provide you with this type of information. It will help you obtain marketing data that is detailed and precise. You can see which graphics people have clicked on as well as what web page they were on just before they left your website.

Once you've mastered the technique of updating your home page, while at the same time keeping the core content the same, you'll be well on your way to recognizing the benefits of a flexible home page.

Reusing pieces of HTML code is a common way of making web sites (or web applications) more consistent, reliable, and more manageable. Even a small web site consisting of perhaps 20 or 30 web pages can benefit from reusing code for header and footer sections, for example. If the same header or footer is used across all the pages on the site, it makes sense to put the header and footer code in separate files, and then call those files to insert their contents where required.

PHP offers two statements that can be used for inserted the contents of one file inside another: include() and require(). These two statements are virtually identical, with the only real difference being that if require() fails, it gives a fatal error, whereas if include() fails it just gives a warning. For this reason I tend to use the include() statement as it just seems slightly more friendly.

So, to include the contents of a file called header.inc inside a web page called index.php, you would just need to insert the following line of code (wrapped in PHP opening and closing tags) inside index.php.

Include 'header.inc';

As PHP takes no notice of the extension used for the included file, you can use whatever extension you want to. Be careful though, if you put passwords inside an include file with a .inc extension, they will be visible. You can get around this by putting include files that contain sensitive information outside the document tree to prevent people from browsing to them.

In Part 2 we'll look at the use of functions when developing web sites and applications.