Some people dream of success... while others wake up and work hard at it.

To succeed isn't ever easy. Success on the World Wide Web isn't easy too. Yet some webpreneurs seem to think success should start the moment they have pronounced the word. Success on the World Wide Web demands commitment and strong web business fundamentals, without which success can never really be anything more than a distant dream. So what makes a web business fundamentally strong?

The pillars of a strong web business

1. Content

Content is king. Content acquires gigantic proportions on the Internet because content is what drives the World Wide Web. It is again content that drives the multibillion dollar entities like Google, Overture and others. Content can make or break a website. The power of the written word has been witnessed many a time. Products have become success stories, resumes transformed into high profile jobs, a 10-cent brochure into millions of dollars just because of the right word.

A content rich site, with content relevant to the niche being targeted, means the site has the first ingredient for what it takes to become successful.

2. The website framework and SEO

Now that you have the right content, the next task is to be able to present that content on the website in a way to attract the search engines to come over and over again. The right framework includes a dynamic way of serving and updating content on the website. A way that also enables editing and modifying content at will.

The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aspect includes search engine friendly urls. Believe it or not, most of our search engine do not like dynamic urls that end with a query (e.g. url.com?query). Simple urls rock, at least in the search engines. Similarly the search engines love simple and more importantly the correct code that can be spidered by them.

3. Link strategy

A link strategy means the back links or the number of quality links to your website. Your PR (Page Rank, explained below) is determined by this. A link strategy means creating, inviting, exchanging and monitoring links with other similar sites.

PR, an abbreviation for Page Rank, is the heart of Google.com. PR is a system for ranking web pages developed by its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while there are dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, Page Rank continues to provide the basis for all of web search tools on Google. PR is simply an indication of the number of websites that link to a specific website. It also attempts to indicate the quality of those links. PR ranges from 0 to 10 (with 10 being the 'best' PR and 0 being the 'worst'). The vast majority of small business websites will usually find they have a PR of between 0 and 5.

The Page Rank mechanism

Page Rank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher Page Rank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines Page Rank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

A good link strategy is a time consuming job but if implemented well simply does wonders for an online business.

More on strategies for success in the World Wide Web next week.

"Success is simple. Do what's right, the right way, at the right time."