The most important ingredient for online success is the ingredient most people pass by. It's the foundation. It's the groundwork that forms the basis of everything you do thereafter. Without laying the foundation, all your efforts will produce inferior results. This article will briefly describe the first steps to building a successful online business.

The first thing you need to do is identify your target market. This may sound overly simplistic but you need to get specific here. Who is your market? Who are they? What do they do? What do they have in common? Try to get as specific as possible and write everything down. Make a series of bullet points describing your target market, your audience, your ideal customer.

Once you know who you're targeting, you need to develop a list of keyword phrases. This should start with a visit to your competitors? sites where you can view their meta tags and see what they're targeting. The next step is to put your favorite keywords into the publicly-accessible Google keyword tool to see which words have the greatest organic search volume while encountering the least amount of competition.

Take those keyword phrases and enter them into a Google search to see what the competition is in the organic world (as opposed to the ppc world). And lastly, enter them into the WordTracker keyword tool to get an estimate of their actual daily search volume. With these four steps, you should be able to find a series of keyword phrases you can target that have the least amount of competition.

With your targeted keyword phrases in hand, you can begin writing your positioning statement. Your positioning statement should be between 15 and 25 words long and should accurately and concisely describe your business such that anyone reading it for the first time could immediately identify your business and core competency.

Your positioning statement should be included in your meta tags as your website description. It should also be included on your homepage so visitors will see it first when they enter your site. Lastly, your positioning statement should be used in every online location that includes a backlink to your website, including article directories, forums posts and email signatures.

Go back to WordTracker and get a one-day membership. Enter your chosen keyword phrases and print out the related words it generates. The search engines look for related words when they index your website and the best resource for determining the related words you should be using is WordTracker. The one-day membership will cost you about $8.

Keep the list of keyword phrases and their related words near by when you begin building out your website. You should get in the habit of incorporating them as often as possible on your individual webpages. This will become natural after a while but a conscious effort needs to be made at the beginning to develop the pattern. Your keywords should also be included in the meta tags of each page on your website, customized for the content on that particular page.

Taking these steps will leave you with a better foundation than 99% of the websites out there. It really doesn't take that much time. You can do most of it in a single afternoon but the impact on your websites focus and search engine ranking will magnify all the other internet marketing activities you undertake. Lay the foundation first and move forward afterwards.