As an information systems architect and engineer with decades of experience in WWW development I'm often concerned with Internet visibility. Everybody wants their website to be highly visible, especially if they're using the Web to promote their business. Since the dawn of the WWW and the rise of search engines individuals and organizations have tried various ways to ensure their website rises to the top of the list in Internet searches. I personally have seen numerous techniques employed -- many legitimate but many not-so-much -- applied to improve search engine rankings. Some attempts to game the system have been drastic enough that search algorithms now have features to penalize bad actors. It should be kept in mind that there's no magical panacea that can guarantee website visibility. Simply standing up a site is no guarantee that world will beat a path to your door. Once it's up, promoting your website and your business is up to you and your customers. That said, three decades out from the inception of the World Wide Web, an Internet presence is a must-have for nearly any successful business. And good visibility goes a long way toward building a thriving business. To help folks create and improve a Web presence, this article provides some technical recommendations to ensure visibility. I don't intend it as a comprehensive work on search engine optimization (SEO), or, SEO, but rather as a short-list of tips, techniques and practices with a focus on technical strategies to improve Website visibility.

Number One: Verify Indexing

Search engines work by indexing websites. Programs called web crawlers scour the Internet daily discovering and indexing hyperlinks to web-sites to create a sort of catalog. Content is indexed by keywords which then can be used to retrieve information. "Googling" -- using key words to search for and retrieve information on the Internet has become a fundamental skill here at the dawn of the new millennium. So the first thing you want to do to make sure your site comes up in a search is verify that it has been indexed. The easiest way to do that is use the site: operator the Google search bar (or pick the search engine of your choice).

For example, enter:

site:mywebsite.com And you should see a list of pages that the search engine has indexed from your site.

Number Two: Submit Your Site to Google

If you're not sure whether your site or some specific set of "pages" on your site have been indexed you can submit them for indexing using Google Search Console. In general, GSC us a great tool to know about since you can get a lot of information about your site indexes, statistics related to visits, inbound hyperlinks, etc..

Three: Get External Links to your Site

Indeed, inbound links is another factor in the search ranking algorithm that can help your site percolate its way up to the top of the list. You'll want to promote your website with hyperlinks which you can get in a number of ways (through social media like Facebook and Linked In, for example).

Tip Four: Optimize your HTML for Search

While using techniques like "keyword stuffing" (i.e., repeating certain keywords over and over to boost your ranking) is bad practice (indeed, this tactic will actually lower your ranking) there are a number of legitimate techniques to boost your ranking using HTML. Here are a few to get you started:

1. Add Metadata: Ensure each page and post has a unique title, meta description, and relevant keywords.

2. Structure your content: Use Headings (H1, H2, etc.). Use clear headings and subheadings.

3. Use Alt Text for Images: Include descriptive alt attributes for all images.

Improve Content Quality

Write good descriptive content that clearly sets out what you have to offer. Use keywords naturally throughout your text. But don't try to stuff your text -- that will just sound clumsy and make your attempts to manipulate the system obvious.

Technical Improvements

There are also legitimate documents you can create that are actually intended to help search engines index your site.

1. Create a sitemap.xml file and submit it to Google Search Console.

2. Ensure your robots.txt file doesn't block search engines.

3. Use canonical URLs to indicate the preferred URL for each page within your site, avoiding duplicate content issues.

4. Make sure you’re not using in your HTML.

Summary

So, there you have it. As promised, this was not a comprehensive work on SEO for web development. Instead, it's a shortlist of tips and techniques to improve your web presence and Internet visibility. I suggested ways to verify your site is indexed, checking some aspects of your HTML to help with ranking and some technical files you ensure are present to help with indexing. Also, I recommended one or two bad practices to avoid. But at the end of the day what matters most is the value of the content you provide. It's really up to you to promote your work and provide top quality products and services to build your reputation.