To perform this task manually you would need to choose your keyword phrase and do a search of Google. Then you would need to analyze the on page optimization of the top 3 sites by analyzing the backlinks to their site, the Page Rank of each individual site, count how many times the keyword phrase appears on the page, go to view source and analyze if there are any header tags, look at the title of the page and the description, write down the meta tags, and count how many times the keywords are bolded, underlined and italicized.

Of course this can be extremely time consuming and exhausting.

Submitexpress.com can be very helpful in getting you started with this manual task.

Alternatively, you could use an automated software tool like Seo Elite.

Here is how you would perform this task with that seo software.

The First Step

It's important that before you even start creating your website content that you do a little keyword research. This is absolutely essential and should never be glossed over.

Use any of the large number of keyword tools available such as Good Keywords, Wordtracker, DigitalPoint or the Overture keyword tool and put your chosen keyword or phrase into it. In this example we'll use the word diet.

Now when you do this you will notice there are a range of keywords related to the word diet. Currently, the word diet is searched for 986732 times monthly on Google. That's good news. The bad news is that there is way too much competition for you to ever achieve high rankings without a lot of hard work and perseverance. In fact, there are 149,000,000 websites that are also competing for the word diet.

The Second Step

Don't optimize your website or content for the word diet!

The Third Step

Health diet fitness is searched for 18276 times monthly on Google with a lot less competition - 60,600 competing websites!

This would be a very good place to start. Once you are getting traffic for less competitive seo phrases you can start to optimize your websites for larger phrases.

The Fourth Step

Go to google and type in "health diet fitness" and do an analysis of the top three sites in Google.

Is it a top level web page (ie a dot com name only) or is it a page of a website that is not just dot com. If it is that's great news as it invariably is easier to rank well for a dot com domain than pages off that domain that aren't the home page.

The Fifth Step

What is the page rank of the top three sites in Google? Page Rank is how Google monitors the value of a specific website. If, for example, the sites are less than PR 4 that is pretty good. However, a site with a PR of 6 or higher would be a lot more difficult to compete with.

If you are wondering how you go about checking Page rank simply go to http://toolbar.google.com and download the free Google Toolbar.

How To Increase Page Rank

The only way to increase your page rank is by increasing the amount of other sites that are actually linking back to you. How Google perceives it is that if you have a lot of quality links back to your site then you must be an authority site of some kind.

The Sixth Step

View the source code by clicking view, then source.

Things to look out for:

1. If they are using header tags

2. Whether the main keyword is being used in the beginning and end of the page.

3. Whether they have bolded, underlined and italicized the main keywords throughout the page.