A landscape contractor and his computer saavy cousin, started a website for me about 3 years ago. In time, a friend - webmaster - took over the edits; mainly my choice, but he did the work. In time, to afford continual additions, I figured out how to get a basic grip on the site myself, and my son gave me his Dreamweaver software.

After about 18 months, my site has been the best ranking commercial landscape designer PLUS arborist / tree service site in the state of Oregon. Basically in the top 3 positions of the companies shown, but more often in 1st and 2nd for the majority of keyword strings. The site has maintained this position for about 2 years solid.

After tinkering on my site for a while, I wrote a topic page about website purpose and ranking, which I keep on my website. Much of the information is well known by SEOs and webmasters, but I've included some reasoning about the PRIMARY purpose for a website.

What should a website accomplish?

If you are interested, this is the page:

http://www.mdvaden.com/search_engine.shtml

Unique (since I'm an arborist & designer), is that our safe woods for pet birds page is our highest traffic web page. It's said to be the best of it's kind. My wife has birds, and that page evolved out of our research for safe and toxic woods when we were making perches.