You have probably just built a new website, submitted it to search engines and are now waiting wondering where all the visitors are that are going to put hundreds of dollars into your bank account. A few weeks pass by and you are still left wondering where all your website traffic is. Your website is open for business but no-one seems to know about it.



If this situation sounds familiar to you then you have probably thought about giving up and thowing the whole thing away. This is NOT what you should do and this is not how your website is going to rank high in the search engines.

There is one critical first step that you must follow when creating any website. This crucial first step involves picking the best keywords for your on page optimization and the only way you can decide which keywords will get you the highest rankings for your website is by doing some research.

Your first point of call must be at one or all of the following online keyword research tools:

http://www.goodkeywords.com

http://www.digitalpoint.com

http://www.overture.com

http://www.wordtracker.com

All of these tools are free (there is a free trial for Wordtracker); however, where Wordtracker differes from the other websites mentioned above is it shows you how competitive your keywords are compared to other websites. The higher the KEI analysis number the less competitive the keyword phrase is and the easier it should be to get a high ranking with that chosen keyword.

In Goodkeywords you type in your chosen niche topic. For argument sake we will use the example camping. Goodkeywords will bring up the top 100 keywords related to campming that were searched in the last month. On the right the number of times that keyword has been displayed appears for the last 30 days. It is absolutely critical that you do NOT start on page optimization of your home page for keywords at the very top of the list. Before you think I'm crazy there is a very good reason for this and that is if a certain keyword high on the list is searched that many hundreds of thousands of times you will have an almost impossible time to get noticed between all the other hundreds or millions of competitive websites that are also targeting that same keyword. For this reason alone do not start off optimizing your website for the keyword camping.

Let me go back a minute to show how competite the word camping is. If I go to Google and enter camping I find that there are 230 million other websites targeting the same phrase. It is always best to start of targeting keywords that have the least competitive keywords as possible. Once you start getting traffic from search engines with your main keywords you may then start targeting more competitive phrases.

Using the online tools I've mentioned above it's easy to find a few less competitive phrases that can be a good base for our on page website optimization related to camping.

It is also important to repeat the same research process by going to Google and seeing how competitve your chosen keywords are. I will start with the keyword and take a few minutes to analyse the number 1 website for that keyword on Google.

It is also critical to analyze what the page rank is of the number 1 website for your chosen keyword. Page rank is used by Google in ranking websites and generally the more links that you have pointing back to your website by other websites the higher your Google page rank will be. Download the Google toolbar for free to find out what your page rank is and the page rank of other websites at http://toolbar.google.com.

Now we need to do a little spying on the website that has number one for that keyword. We do that by looking at the HTML code or source code of their website. Go to that website url and click on View and then Source. That website's HTML code will appear in a notepad file. That file contains what the web page will look like when "read" by search engine robots. This trick will show you exactly what on page optimization is being used to rank so highly in the search engines.

Search engine optimization involve both on page and off page optimization. In this article I am focusing on on page optimization. I will deal with off page optimization in more detail at another time.

Now when we view the source code we want to look at the header tags for a start. Do you see h1 at the very top of the source code. If not then that's a bonus. If you do then it is important to make a note of what words they are using for their heading 1.

The next thing you need to look at is title. What is the title that they are using. This should appear immediately below the head tag. It is also important to make a note of the keywords that they are using in the title. The less words you actually have in your title the better. It is also critical that your main keyword or keyword phrase is in your title too.

Now take a moment to check out the keywords that they are using in the meta tags and make a note of them. Use the same keywords they use, check out the keywords that they have used in their description. Make a note of their description. A good guide for you is to repeat your main keyword or keyword phrase two or three times in the description but obviously in a way that makes sense.

Look at their webpage to find out if they have bolded, underlined or italicised their main keywords. If they have then you know that you need to do the same thing to achieve high rankings for your chosen keyword. If you have trouble looking for these codes in the notepad file simply look at the webpage itself.

One more thing to look out for in their source code is wehther they have optimized their images for the chosen keyword. For example, some website images will simply have bigebook.jpg as the name of their image but have not used alternative text. An example of an alternative text would be home made dog treat ecover.

Just following a few of these very simple SEO techinques and strategies will greatly increase your rankings in the search engines. To ensure you get the highest possible search engine rankings that you can it's absolutely critical that you spend a little time finding out search engine optimization secrets of the professionals. Fortunately affordable small business seo techniques and help is readily available if you know where to look.