Ted had asked me to review his site and give him some suggestions. The Vice-President of marketing for a large commercial real estate developer, his site for a new downtown multi-use center was "lost in space" as far as search engines were concerned.

The site had been up for over six months and still wasn't registering on Google or other search engines. He was paying a fortune in Pay-Per-Click  (PPC) to some company I'd never heard of, and nothing was happening there either. His plan, which made sense, was to use PPC for six-to-nine months while his ranking in Google and other search engines rose.

But that hadn't happened. In fact, you could "google" the name of the project and it didn't come up.

One look at his site had told me most of what i needed to know. I confirmed it by doing a spider search simulation to verify my facts.

Ted's site was one big Flash-construct. The only words on the landing page were the name of the project. I started explaining how spiders don't read Flash, and therefore the landing page, together with ten other pages his designer had built around Flash and Javascript (which spiders also don't read), weren't being indexed as a result. No indexing by spiders = no rankings.

For an hour I went back-and-forth. Ted wanted a "cool" site that would rank in the search engines. He wanted a site dominated by Flash and images. He didn't want a lot of "words." I gave him my recommendations and left.

Last time I checked, Ted's site still was unlisted on Google.

Google has indexed 8 Billion web pages and is hard at work on the next 8 Billion as you read this. They do this with a small army of search engine spiders.

If you're interested in getting high rankings on Goolge and other search engines, the spiders are your best friend. And you've got to know what to do to make them feel invited. Your website must be "spider-friendly" to make them feel welcome.

Spiders don't read websites the way you and I do. Spiders read the HTML, the web page source code. So if your site has bad code, or little or no code, the spiders don't care too much for your site. And they leave without having indexed you.

Spiders love websites with content (text) and good code. They dislike Javascript and images, since they can't read either one. That's not to say you can't allow them to "see" the images with good web design, they'll be more than happy to crawl over your image if you happen to attach an ALT tag to it.

It's a tricky business, designing a site that both human and search engine spider visitors will like. You want the human visitors to stop by, visit and potentially buy your product or service. And the best means to get your prospects to your site is to have sound web design: good content, good site design and good code.

At a minimum, those three items are necessary to get the spiders to crawl your site and index it. We won't even go into linking strategies, the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and valid XHTML, the latest generation in HTML standards, right now.

Once you're indexed, if you've done things correctly and continue to do so, you're on your way to the top of the rankings.

It's complicated. It's confusing. It can drive you nuts if you do it on your own.

And, yes, you can do it on your own, but as you see, there's a lot of work involved. But it's necessary work.

According to some surveys, as many as 86% of all people arrive at a particular website via the search engines. So if you want prospects to find you, you've got to have a site that is properly designed and search engine optimized.

A high ranking on the search engines can bring you highly targeted traffic, traffic that is searching for your service or product. You can't afford to miss these vistors just because you want a "cool" site and ignore proper SEO-freindly design conventions.

And by the way, if you get a smart webdesigner and copywriter together, you can have a site that is both "cool" and spider-friendly.

My suggestion? If you don't have time to educate yourself on spider-firendly webdesign, check into using a professional search engine optimization company.