It’s proven that you can make money on the web if you have customers. You have customers if you have viewers; if you have traffic. And you get traffic if your site is easy to find - near the top - in the search engine results pages (SERPs). But that’s not so easy to achieve.

Although some search engines will eventually find your site by themselves, most of the time this only happens if somebody links to your site. In the case of a NEW site, having existing links is almost impossible. Rather than wait for links to be made, start a submission campaign.

You need to be leary of using website submission software. This may be quick and easy, but some web directories and search engines do NOT accept automated submissions.

It’s true that manual submission is a time consuming process — you’ll have to read AND follow each search engines’ submission guidelines, to effectively perform the submission but it’s a necessary step.

Let’s say that you submitted your site correctly, you waited a reasonable amount of time - usually a few weeks for the search engines to process your submission, but your site does not appear near the top in the SERPs.

3 - Proper HTML coding is very important but the structure and the layout of the pages are equally important. I saw sites without ANY way to contact the company: no email address, no “contact page”. I saw sites so crowded that it was almost impossible to find my way around. I saw sites with ugly color schemes. I saw a site so “”heavy”" that it took nearly three minutes to download the Home Page.

According to statistics, users have very limited patience when it comes to loading a page. If after four seconds they cannot see the page, they leave. And we all know what that means or the success of a Web site.

I not only saw all those errors in sites that are now gone but I also found them in sites that are still alive, including, incredibly, some Fortune 500 companies’ Web sites.

Do the right thing when you prepare the Web site. Hire reputable professionals to build and promote your cyber adventure. If you already have a Web site, remember that a Web site can easily be redesigned and properly resubmitted to search tools.

Have your site designed according to W3C Recommendations (the Official HTML coding rules). Yes, this takes time and it’s much easier to use an HTML editor, but the results are much better when properly coded by hand or a good editor such as Dreamweaver. Watch your site’s accessibility and usability. Don’t forget to test and validate the code. Another thing - do yourself a favor - check the spelling on your pages.

Avoid too many gizmos: JavaScripts, widgets, flash, and frames. Bells and whistles will NEVER help your page ranking. In fact, it will hurt your site’s indexing or ranking in the Search Engines and will annoy most of your viewers. So, be sure to use these with care!

Have interesting content in your pages, content that grabs your viewer’s attention. No matter how beautiful your site is, no matter how much professional promotion you made, if the site doesn’t grab viewer’s interest, he will leave — you guessed it — to your competitor sites.

Also, use the title tag, the keyword and description meta tags in your HTML coding (in the head tag) to list targeted keywords from the contents of your pages. This helps the search engines rank your site higher. But you need to limit the keywords to no more than 10.

Promote the site thoroughly. Submit the site properly to search engines and web directories and pay special attention to the link popularity issue- contact webmasters of related sites to ask them to include a link to your site. Yes, it takes time, but it’s worth it.

So, let’s see: do we dot-com or not? You bet we do! There are tremendous opportunities on the Internet. Find your niche, follow the rules, work hard and you’ll make it.

It will not be easy but if you believe in your dream and set realistic expectations, you’ll be successful.