By Joseph Murray

So you want to start an online business? I am prompted to write this article after receiving a phone call from my daughter a couple days ago. Apparently she had just returned home from an information meeting about starting your own online business. At the end of this two hour meeting, she decided on the spot that she did indeed want to start an online business and these people apparently could show her how; for a small investment of $3000. What? How much? Well what do you get for that?

Well regardless, to my way of thinking; unless they are going to register the domain, write the website, find your product and upload it to the site and get you a ranking on some search engines; then it isn't worth it. So before anyone else throws down $3000 at an information meeting; let me give you some insight into how easy it really is to start your own online business.

For the purpose of this article I will use my own site www.aitechworld.com as the examples. For your own purpose simply transpose your own information over mine.

First lets look at online business verses brick and mortar business. There are some initial key similarities. You need a location. For an online business; this is a website. Your website; like a traditional store needs an address. On the internet that would be your domain name. The domain name is very important the same as putting a traditional store way in the backwoods where nobody would ever see it. You want to choose a domain name that expresses what your business is all about. Today there are billions of domain names registered so getting the precise name you want probably won't happen; however look at your options carefully and pick a name you can market. This will be important later.

There are likely thousands of sites that you can investigate domain names. I always used GoDaddy.com for mine. When you do a search and it comes back and say that domain name is taken; it also gives you dozens of alternates based on your search. This is a good place to start. Get a list of names; research them; build on them; brainstorm; narrow them down; and finally pick the best of the best. You can register yourself also at GoDaddy.

So you have a business idea; which I assume includes a product? Right? And an address. The next thing to do; you do have a product right? Okay then the next thing to do is to? write your webpage (build your store)? Nope. Actually we're going to follow more tradition and think about how the store must compliment the product which must compliment the store. In our case; we need to think about keywords. Your keywords, and your domain name will be two of the three most important things that contribute to your rankings on the search engines. We'll get to the third one a little later on.

What are keywords and why are they so important. Which keywords should I use? How often do I use them? Where do I use them? All of these have to be considered and resolved before you write one piece of your site. Or should be. You can revamp an existing website but we won't get into that here. We'll assume this is for the purpose of creating a new site.

Which keywords do I use? The easiest way to start analyzing which keywords is to first think of what you would search for on the internet to find the exact products or services that you will be offering. In my case I sell discount consumer electronics. This is the meat of my site and the area I wanted to target. So I do a search on Google for ?discount consumer electronics?. Now look through the results and see if any of the websites returned are selling what you are selling. If not; try another search term and repeat this process until you find it. Try to be as specific as possible. Search engines today are very complex and don't have a problem deciphering long strings of text. Try it sometime; you'll be amazed.

Once you find relevant sites, there are a couple of routes you can take to hone your own keywords. The first thing you want to do is look at what they are using for keywords. To do this you need to look at the source code of the target website. I won't go into details; but if you browse to their website; then right click anywhere on the page you should be able to select ?view source? or something to that effect. Copy and save their keywords. Do this for several sites and save all the keywords to a text file on your computer.

Now we have something to work with. In Series 2 of this article I will tell you how to refine those keywords based on relevance to your site, popularity, and your own marketing strategy. Also we will continue on building more of the foundation of a website; and online business; that will rank well in its own right. And without laying out $3000.

Until then; happy keyword hunting.

Best Regards

Joseph Murray

http://www.aitechworld.com

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