The influence of meta keywords on search engine crawlers has diminished during the last few years, so it's increasingly common to see pages without them. The easiest way to do this, if you use the Netscape browser, is to click the Page Info selection of the View menu, then click the Links tab to see a summary of all the site's links and link text.Fortunately, Google makes performance easy to track through the PageRank display in the Google browser window and, of course, the search results pages. Google fulfills over 55 billion searches a year.A small niche in Google still represents thousands or millions of searches, and that many potential visitors and customers.So,refine your keyword choices to specific, tightlydefined concepts around which you can build a high-quality, optimized page.

However, remember that it can take six weeks for PageRank changes to affect your place in the index.Your traffic logs also serve as indicators of the success of your optimization efforts.Success is less about meeting the competitive standard of hot keywords than it is about becoming a hot site in a smaller niche.The only meaningful test of keywords and your page's optimization is performance.If you're not on that first page of search results, you're not visible.Everyone wants to succeed in the businesses represented by hot keywords - the most-searched words ? because that's where the highest traffic flows.

You should choose a domain name that contains your keyword(s) for the Google spider, which looks hard at domains as indicators of relevance.Carrying through the idea that site optimization begins at the beginning, the first SEO step is to register your site's domain.You should probably ignore gigantic success stories Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, and Google, whose domain names (and company names) have little contextual meaning.For most businesses, the domain name should convey the subject at hand.The relevance factor in the domain name isn't about making it easy for visitors to remember you, although that doesn't hurt. The domain name should be chosen with an eye to the keywords around which your site is, or will be, constructed.Ideally, the domain actually contains core keywords.If you own technology or a business model as groundbreaking and earth-shaking as each of these companies deploys, you can get cute with the domain name, too.

Although it's better to have a perfect domain name as a .com than another extension, Google's spider treats .net, .org, .biz, and other domain extensions the same as the .com extension. In fact, Google threatens expulsion from the index for attempting to lure visitors in this manner.Accordingly, throw out the old-school optimizing rule that .com is a more valuable extension than .net, .biz, or the others.