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If you're anything like me, you've probably created a brand new website. Submitted it to a few search engines and hoped that people would mysteriously show up at your site and buy whatever it is you were selling.

After a couple of weeks go by and only a few stray people show up at your website, you decide to try and "optimize" your website around your main keyword in hopes that you just might rank well in 1 of the millions of search engines. Another couple of weeks go by and still no luck.

At this point you probably give up and decide to either build another website around a different target market or just lose all hope and quit. Well, news flash, as you've probably figured out by now, this is not the way to go about doing things.

Let me give you a specific example of what your very first steps MUST be when creating any website.

In our example, let's create a weight loss related website. Before we start creating and collecting content for the website we need to do a little keyword research. This is VERY important and should not be skipped. To do our keyword research we need to visit a few websites.

The first of which should be http://www.goodkeywords.com/ .

They have a very good keyword tool and best of all, it's free! Once we've downloaded this software, we can enter the most generic keyword for our website into the software. In our example, our keyword would be "weight loss".

You'll notice that in the screenshot below, Good Keywords will return a list of related terms. The "count" column will then show us how many times the specific keyword has been searched for the previous month within the Overture.com search engine. Generally, you can take that number times 8, in order to estimate the number of times that keyword has been searched within Google for the previous month.

You'll notice that weight loss was searched 1,592,607 times during the previous month.

Do NOT start off by optimizing for the keyword "weight loss"

Why? you ask... If a keyword is searched that many times in Overture, then 100 times out of 100, the competition you will have to outrank will be extremely fierce. This is not something you should try to take on right away.

Let's take a quick peek at Google so I can show you exactly how many websites are competeting for this keyword.

If you were to optimize your website based on this keyword, you'd be competing against over 45 million other websites! I don't know about you, but that's an aweful lofty goal to start with.

By the end of this course, you will be able to eventually target HUGE keywords such as "weight loss", but it's always best to start off on the keywords with less competition. Get some traffic with those keywords, and THEN you can focus on the larger keywords.

Ok, so back to finding which keywords we want to target.

If we scroll down, we can find some more specific keyword phrases like "weight loss story", "weight loss picture", and "safe weight loss".

These could be possible keywords we should target to begin with. Once we have our list of 3 to 4 keywords, we need to go to Google and check out the competition to see exactly how hard it will be to optimize for the specified keyword.

You'll notice that the #1 ranked website for "weight loss story" is:
http://www.runwalkjog.com/weight_loss_success_story.htm which is not a top level webpage, meaning it's not simply http://www.runwalkjog.com/

This is good news for us because, typically, if a website's subpage is ranking well in Google, we have an immediate advantage if we choose to target the same keyword with our homepage (i.e. www.domain.com). For now, just take my word on this , as I will go into more detail why it's usually easier to rank well for your homepage than any other webpage on your website.

You'll also notice that the website has a Google Page Rank of 5.

Note: Here's a quick definition of Page Rank. Page Rank is Google's way of giving a specific value to how popular your website is. It is based on the number of "votes" other websites cast for your website. A "vote" is simply when another website places a link on their website that is pointing to your website. Generally, the more "votes" or links you have pointing to your website, the higher your Page Rank (PR) will be. Page Rank is 1 of the many factors that Google takes into account when ranking websites.

In order to see your own Google Page Rank, as well as others, you must have the Google Toolbar installed on your computer. You can get that for free here: http://toolbar.google.com/

Seeing that the #1 ranked website for this keyword only has a Page Rank of 5 is also good news for us, because a Page Rank of 5 should be reasonable to obtain. Remember, the ONLY way to increase our website's Page Rank is by getting other websites to link to us. Later, I'll teach you the right way to get thousands of links pointing to your website in a matter of a few days.

View The Source Code

Next we need to view the source code of this website by clicking "view", then "source" within our web browser as shown below:

This will open up a text file for us to have a look at and see if this website is actually optimizing their "Onpage Optimization factors".

* Side Note: There are 2 types of optimization, onpage and offpage optimization. We'll cover offpage optimization in the following lessons.

We now know we can easily out optimize this
#1 ranked website!

... Atleast for all the onpage optimization factors that Google deems as important. The reason we know we can out optimize them is because of the following things we've found out by analyzing their website:

* Remember , the main idea behind ranking well on Google is to analyze the top ranked websites and then doing those things that they're doing, BUT just a little more to on up them and obtain a better ranking.

We'll continue to go through the same process for the other 2 keywords we've found. It is best to analyze the top 5 ranking websites for each keyword. If the top 5 websites for a specific keyword have a Google Page Rank of 6 or higher, it's probably not best to shoot for that keyword until we build some momentum and get some initial traffic from the easier ranking keywords with less competition.

Earlier I mentioned that keyword research was very important in building traffic. Some other very good resources for building keywords and finding niche phrases include the following: