My simple answer to this question is “Build a great website with relevant and fresh content.” Most people don’t know what a “great website” means beyond what they consider great looking and functional—a good start—but that is why they are asking me. The next thing I tell someone with a smallish company is that I recommend setting up their website on the most popular blogging and content management system, Wordpress. “But I’m not sure I want a blog,” they tell me, slightly panicked at the thought of more demands on their time. “Not necessary,” I reply. “But it will be built in and ready in case you change your mind.”

Why Wordpress? Why not? Search engines love it, it gives people control over their own content via an easy-to-learn interface, and it’s evolving quickly, with people worldwide developing extra features for it, all for free. Wordpress is one of many similar platforms, and there are others that are a bit more sophisticated (with a steeper learning curve), but for many of the types of sites I do, Wordpress works beautifully.

I used to create static websites, and really had to adhere as much as possible to certain guidelines to make my websites search-engine friendly. Now, with the advent of blogging and sites integrated on blogging platforms, it’s gotten easier to make my websites search engine friendly. Here is a basic list of Google’s guidelines of what they like to see in a website (yes, you can get banned from Google if they catch you trying to circumvent their guidelines to get a higher rank):

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
• Review our image guidelines for best practices on publishing images.

In my experience, sites I develop on the Wordpress platform show up in search engine rankings the first week after they are launched, without even being submitted to Google, even if all the guidelines aren’t met (for smaller sites I don’t always use sitemaps). An easy way to find out if your site is getting crawled (and to find out if anyone else is writing about you), is to create a Google Alert for yourself, or search terms relevant to your site.

If only it had been that easy to be popular.