In the beginnings, it was called ARPANET (funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).  These were government paid connections between universities (.edu), big corporations (.com), government (.gov) and military (.mil) facilities.  It was designed to be bomb proof with automatic rerouting.  It was intended for military use, publishing research papers, and exchanging messages using the early version of SMTP (Simple Message Transfer Protocol).  It was a six bit system back then.  Only the keyboard characters could be used.  They did not know how to use the lower 32 characters and the eighth bit was used for parity checks.  We are still stuck with trying to make do with only the basic keyboard characters.

Then they decided to create the World Wide Web, which became known as the Internet.  They added "www." in front of the domain names to separate the Internet from ARPANET.  The universities added www as a subdomain to set up their own web sites and started evolving HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) based on some of the early document typesetting programs like AllWrite and WordStar.  Other companies with Internet connections started creating their own sites along with www.bizynet.com in 1993.

The government started releasing their cross country connections to commercial companies and ARPANET faded out.  Along the way, the need to append www in front of domain names disappeared and it stopped being treated as a subdomain.  All of the hosting systems started treating www like a surplus "Mr" or "Mrs" tacked in front of a person's name.  Later, when the search engines came along, they treated with and without the www as the same location.

All of the search engines, except Google, basically ignore the existence of the www and don't care if it is used or not.  It's a matter of preference.  Some people must have "Dr" or another title tacked in front of their name to feel important.  In the case of "www", it's surplus and no longer has any significance.  You can force its use, but it's an ego trip most people don't need or appreciate.

Try a search for "Internet History" on your favorite search engine to find much more detailed information.

Popular and profitable web pages that get good search engine rankings are built from the bottom up.  You use the most basic HTML (oldest) tags you can that get things displayed as needed.  You also ignore words like "deprecated", that are used to encourage use of slower, more complicated, and less compatible coding.

A fancy paint job on an automobile is great but its the nuts and bolts underneath that brings home the groceries.

The search engines also track the age of a web site as another popularity indicator.  It will pick up extra points each year if the home page changes now and then.

Each web page on a site is ranked separately.  Usually the home or opening page ranks highest.

The search engines depend on pleasing the people using them for searches.  They go to great lengths to put the best pages at the top of the search list.  However, they cannot tell what a web page looks like or understand what it says.  They must establish the sorting order based on what a computer program can match and count.

Because your web site must try and out rank the sites that attempt to stack the numeric counting the search engines must use, you need to understand how to out perform them using open and legitimate techniques.  If you try beat the system, the house always wins.

Because too many pages use the TITLE, Keywords Meta tag, and other Heading lines to stuff in extra words, the search engines count those repetitions as one appearance.  If the words do not appear in the readable text, they may not count at all.

Then the engines count the words in the readable text.  Hidden or text not easily readable counts against the ranking.  Image ALT tags are considered readable.

The engines look at the blocks of text.  The contents of table cells and other dividing elements, along with the paragraph P code, establish the text blocks.  If a block of text contains the searched word(s) too often, it is considered "unnatural" text and ignored for word matches.  Blocks of unnatural text may also cause a ranking penalty.

Just because the text can be read in the source code is only part of what's needed.  The search engines are very good at detecting hidden text.  See also Hidden Text.

Your CTR can also be analyzed for increases or decreases relating to trends or seasons.  A snow board site may rank higher in the winter than in the summer.  Sites specializing in Christmas may rank higher during December and drop radically in January.

Clicks from your site back to the search engine can also be monitored.  This creates a number they can use to determine how long you visited a web site.  Make your site as attractive and entertaining as possible to keep visitors there longer.

A program can match character combinations, count repetitions, and do calculations based on those results.  It does not know what the words mean or what a web page looks like.  It can only use arbitrary numbers to decide what is too many or too few.  They are very good at detecting errors (things that don't match the pattern they expect) but they cannot establish intentions or reasons.

1. TITLE:  It should be your company/site name followed by the purpose of the web page.  Keep it short.

2. KEYWORDS:  Write the best description you can for the purpose and intent of your web site.  This should appear as the first readable text on your home page.  Then make sure the words people are most likely to use in searches are included in the text and the Keywords Meta tag.

3. DESCRIPTION:  Should be a brief description of the web page and should be different for every web page.  Do not repeat any words.

4. IMAGES:  Make sure every image has a mouseover ALT tag description of the picture. Leave the ALT tag empty for invisible images or images less than 10 by 10 pixels.  Do not repeat words in the same ALT tag.  Include your keywords where you can and keep them readable.  Your potential clients are not impressed with obvious keyword stuffing.

5. LINKS:  Include a Title tag describing the link.  Again, your keywords should be worked in.

6. FRESH CONTENT:  Plan on updating the text on your home page at least monthly.  Specials and announcements work well.

7. ROBOTS:  It is a good idea to have a robots.txt file to exclude your images folder, detail links, and all order buttons.  If you let the search engines chase too many links, you can expect problems.

8. SITEMAP:  You can help Google and Yahoo find your most important page by including a sitemap.txt file.  It should be formatted like:
        http://bizynet.com
        http://bizynet.com/Biz-Webd.htm
        http://bizynet.com/BizAbout.htm
        http://bizynet.com/BizyProfile.htm
   The XML versions are a waste of space and time.

9. COMPETITON:  Start checking your keywords with searches on Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines.  After a search, do a search for the domain names at the top of the lists.  You want to know how many other sites link to them.

   You will need as many or more links from other web sites if you are going to rank ahead of them.  You'll also need to out do them on keyword density.

10. LINKS:  Your web site URL appearing on almost any kind of web site (except Link Farms) will improve your ranking.  The Blogs are fair game right now.  That may change when Google and the others discover it is mostly spam and not a realistic indicator of a site's popularity.

    Concentrate on exchanging links with other web sites and don't get carried away posting on every blog you can find.

11. TIME:  The search engines give extra points for sites as they get older.  If you are competing with sites that are three or more years old, you will need to rack up more points in other areas.

12. MONITORING:  Sign up for a Google Account.  It's one of the places to help you keep track of things.  You'll want to tell them where your site map is among other things.

    All servers keep extensive logs on every request made to your web site.  A large amount of information about the performance of your web site can be analyzed from the logs.  If your hosting company does not provide log statistics or FTP access to the logs, you are hosted in the wrong place.

    Please do not allow Google or any other remote site to snoop on your web site with their little scripts.  Your web logs have all of that information and more.