7 Steps to Building a Successful Web Presence

Doing business in the 21st century will eventually require every company to have a website in one form or another. Whether your site is interactive or simply informational, there are steps you can take to ensure you're on the right track to creating a successful web presence, seven to be exact (at least from our humble perspective).

While following these steps will not guarantee a successful website, it is certainly an intelligent place to start.

1. Perform a Business Analysis.
What is a business analysis? Simply put, review your business requirements and your objectives. What do you want to accomplish? How does your website fit into your overall business plan? What... no business plan? Develop a business plan first before you go any further into the process.

Your business plan will be your roadmap to success, so make sure the objective of your website fits into your overall business plan. I'll say it again, BUSINESS PLAN, don't have one? GET ONE!

2. Perform some research, also known as, the Research phase.
Research your competition and industry sites. See what kind of competition is out there. What kind of marketing does your competition engage in? Don't look to "reinvent the wheel", take a look at how the current market works; develop a list of pros and cons about your competition and then make your web presence work better.

3. Develop a concept and a design.
Finally time for the creative and fun stuff! This involves the selection of specific content, the layout of the site structure and navigation and the overall "look and feel" of your website.

Remember to pay special attention to your navigational structure!!! If visitors can't navigate your website or feel lost when doing so, your "pretty" site will have been a waste of time; don't go there, keep the navigation simple and for SEO purposes, make sure your navigation is text based. Although Flash driven websites look cool, they are not SEO friendly and can create more problems than the "coolness" factor they express (we'll discuss Flash sites in another article ).
4. Develop your website.
When considering which technology to develop your website, think cutting edge technology, not bleeding edge. Make sure the technology you use, such as ASP, PHP, HTML, CSS, will be useful for the next three to five years.

Database driven website are ultimately the easiest to maintain through the use of a content management system, but make sure the CMS you use is SEO friendly. An SEO friendly CMS will utilize real URLs, not strange looking query strings with lots of strange characters and question marks. Search engines despise query strings and rank these site accordingly.

5. Choose a host provider and implement your website.
When deciding on a host provider, make sure the host is not only reputable, but has been in business long enough that you can be sure they will be in business next year. Also, ask about site uptime. If your site is down for any reason, this will not only affect your potential and current customers, but the search engines as well. If the search engines decide on a given day to spider your site and it is unavailable, it could cost you your rank.

6. Promote and market your website.
Register your site with the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Initiate other marketing activities such as an email blasts to prospective customers. Consider "Pay per Click" advertising with the major search engines and don't forget about a long term SEO campaign to drive targeted traffic to your site. 7. Finally, maintain your website.
Probably the most important long term step is continuing to provide current and relevant information on your website. Keep your site content current to encourage return visitors and give them something to return for! Related to SEO, search engines just LOVE sites which provide new content on a regular basis and rank such websites accordingly.

Overall, remember, your website is not just a marketing tool, it's a business tool, and it should be generating a revenue stream for your business.

About the Author Matthew Mckernan - About the author, Website Design, Search Engine Optimization/SEO, Web Development.

How to Begin Keyword Research

What is a keyword?

It's anything people type into a search engine. It could be made up of one word or several keyword phrases joined together. Every person uses their own method of searching, and that makes anticipating those keywords that will connect their websites with the right visitors very difficult. Keyword research starts with the understanding that finding lots of related keywords that deliver targeted traffic is the ultimate goal of any keyword research.

Sending thousands of visitors to a site who have no interest in your product, let alone in buying it, is just wasted effort and doesn't do any good for your business. If possible, we want to find the customer who has a clear knowledge of what they want and is close to buying something soon.

We would ideally want a few visitors who are seriously looking to buy in the near future. In order to achieve this, we want to find the least competitive keywords with the highest number of searches that are the most relevant to our website.

If you are just starting out, it definitely would be to your advantage to target lower competition terms. Having success with low competition terms will lead to increased confidence to target more competitive terms with higher search volumes.

Thinking like your customers

Thinking like your customers is easier said than done.

All merchants are guilty of thinking in terms of features and specs of the products and not thinking in terms of benefits it can provide to the customers.

You know your business and market too well. The industry jargons and slang are in your every day language. No wonder when you start your keyword research you have a very narrow keyword focus. You become your own worst enemy in exploring other ideas.

Here is an example: what is the most popular search term, "cheap flights," "cheap seats," "low fares" or "discount fares"?

As you can see it's not that simple to pick the best keywords, is it?

The hardest part of keyword research is to keep an open mind about all possible search methods people might use to look for the same thing. Keyword research is part science, part intuition, and imagination. Since we can't get into the heads of every possible potential visitor to your site who may be interested in your products or services, we have to rely on keyword research tools to tell us what people actually search for and how often.

There are a handful of very powerful keyword research tools that are worth using, but the amount of information you can mine from them is mind boggling.

Another great resource for proven keywords is to look at your competitor's website. We are talking about finding the highest ranking competitors on the search engines using your target keywords. Once you find the top 5-10 competitor sites, perform a quick review of their keywords on the web pages.

This can be a lengthy and slow process, but luckily there are free Keyword Analyzer tools that can dig up keywords from your competitor's sites in a snap. We'll cover in detail how the Keyword Analyzer can be used to add hundreds of keywords to your keyword research project.

Keyword research is like a job interview process

In order to find the right candidate you may need to interview hundreds of applicants to find the perfect fit for the job. Well, the keyword research process is very similar; you have to cast a widenet first to capture all the possible combinations of keywords known to man. Even then, it's almost guaranteed you will discover new keywords you have missed in the original research only a few weeks earlier. What this tells us is the keyword selection and refinement process never ends, or at least it should not end until you are happy with the number of visitors you are receiving to your site.

Where and how to look for keywords

In order to find the best keywords for our website we need to gather information from a variety of resources. Some of these resources may include:

Brainstorming: Getting your brain to go on a magic carpet ride is one of the best ways to find relevant keywords for your website. Don't just settle for asking the obvious question, what does my website sell? Ask questions such as: "What is this product made up of?" or "Who is using my services?" or "What problems do my products solve?"

Finding the main and secondary keyword phrases should take less than a month for even 2 or 3 websites. This does not mean your keyword research has ended forever, but finding the 4-5 word long secondary key phrases can be done with the free keyword research tools if your budget is tight.

Free keyword research tools: You can gain access to the powerful and free Google external keyword tool to expand your keyword list. Unfortunately the Google external keyword tool only gives a search volume indicator instead of the actual search numbers. Another very valuable feature in Google external keyword tool is the "Site-Related Keywords" finder. By simply entering the website URL of your competitors, you can find out in seconds which keywords they target on their web pages.

Another free keyword research tool available without creating an account is the Overture keyword inventory . As of now, August 2007, this tool only shows the January 2007 search volumes as it's being phased out, but Yahoo! is promising a replacement. If you have a Yahoo! Search Marketing account you can still gain access to their keyword tool albeit without the search volume numbers.

Related search terms suggestion tools: One of the fastest ways you can find hundreds of related keywords is to use online lexical or thesaurus tools.

Creating a large initial keyword list that includes a large number of synonyms and acronyms is essential to effective keyword research. Discovering related phrases that are not simply stemming from the original keyword term is a cornerstone of semantic latent indexing . Semantic indexing can be described as the grouping of related documents based on not only direct relationship between words, but the meaning of the words as well.

Some of the search engines provide a related search command list in their search results. Try Clusty by entering a search command and take a look at the "clusters" side bar. You can get dozens of ideas from the keyword clusters by playing with different combination of keywords. You can also visit Technorati a well known blog aggregator and social media tagging site to help unlocked your brain and generate new keywords. Enter a search term and observe the "Related tags" section directly under the search results.

Visitor statistic reports: These can be generated from web server log files or from script based visitor statistic programs. This can help you uncover new keywords for your website by discovering what the visitors are typing into the search engines to find your websites. In some cases, you'll find keywords you didn't expect to come up for in the search results. You should further research those keywords and uncover new keyword niches.

Site search engines: This can be a great source of new keywords and a potential data mining source. As well as further analysis of the average number of keywords, keyword length and other important keyword metrics.

Top ranking competitors: These websites are already well optimized and contain keyword rich web pages. Why not leverage their efforts and harvest the best keywords for your own website? With the help of the SEO Studio keyword analyzer you can extract hundreds of keywords from their META keywords and HTML page content in seconds.

A few examples of good keyword selection practices

Selecting the best keyword takes experience and a little know how, but it's always helpful to see how the pros do it, so here are a few basic steps for keyword selection.

Using your favorite keyword research tool Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or the Keywords Analyzer, type in the main keyword phrase. Start with the broadest possible search terms, this way there is less chance of missing keywords that might otherwise be overlooked.

Look for 2-4 word key phrases that have at least a daily search volume of 200 or more. Since the top 3 sites will receive 60 of all searches, it follows you can expect at least 120 or more unique visitors for those keywords phrases. In some cases, you may want to lower the minimum search volume threshold to as low as 50 if the search term is well targeted for your business.

At this point you should have at least 20-30 really good secondary keywords in your basket.

Hopefully most of the keywords you have selected will have little competition. Some of the keyword tools we have recommended will also tell you the amount of competition for each keyword, but you can also verify these numbers manually by typing the search terms into the search engines with quotes.

It's very important that you use quotes around the keywords to let the engines know you are looking for an exact match. The rule of thumb we use to assess keyword competitiveness is around "100,000" websites. Anything above a hundred thousand results is fairly competitive and requires a fair amount of optimization and link building.

About the Author
Charlie Hearns is a website promoter and SEO professional for TOP Promotions based in Sacramento, CA. See more articles from his forum: http://charliehearns.freeforums.org.

10 Ways To More Website Traffic

Every website needs more traffic. This traffic needs to be as targeted as possible to the site you are promoting, whether it is your own web site or an affiliate program. This is the lifeblood of the business. No traffic - No business, More traffic - More sales

The question is - How do you get this highly targeted web site traffic.

I will list some of the most popular methods.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Of all the pay per click search engines, Google Adwords is the largest and most popular.

This method, when done correctly, will increase your exposure, and give fast results. You must keep up to date with Google's rules, so be sure to read them. You pay a one off fee when you register and set up your campaign. You can have your campaign up and running in minutes. There is a minimum bid, but of course you will have to pay more than this. But the beauty of Adwords is you can set a daily budget of how much you are willing to spend.

You can create as many campaigns as you want, and then test your ads (changing the headline for example).

Google provide tools to help you with your campaigns, and have exellent tutorials that walk you through everything from signing up to creating your Adwords campaigns.

Link popularity

This is achieved when other sites have links to your site. If a high traffic site has links, the search engines perceive both sites must be popular. The important thing is to have quality web sites linking back to your site.

Why should anyone want to link to your site? If you have quality content, this adds perceived value and makes your site popular, so others will want to link to you.The type of content could be:

Free downloads
Free reports, articles, ezine or newsletter
Video
Links to other good sites

Reciprocal Links

This is where you exchange links with other quality sites. You can create a links page on your site. This create a resource that visitors will want to return to. Find quality (there's that word again) web sites related to your subject and contact the webmaster about exchanging links.

Ezine advertising

Most ezines accept advertising. Ezines are online or email newsletters. They are used to build a relationship between a webmaster and a web site visitor, with news, updates, special offers etc. But as always they should have quality content. You place an ad in ezines that are highly targeted towards your niche. Prices depend on the ezine, and also the position of the ad. The most expensive is the solo ad, where yours is the only ad.

Article Submissions

Submitting articles is a great way to build back links and web site visitors. Your articles can become 'viral' when others want to re-publish them on their sites, or use them in their newsletters and ezines. You include links to your site in the author resource box offering more free information. The resource box is your chance to convince the reader to visit your web site.

Two of the most popular places to post your articles are http://www.goarticles.com/ and http://www.EzineArticles.com.

Forum Posting

In order to be successful using forums there are some things that are required. Do Your Homework: Prior to joining any forum, you must do some research. Join relevant forums that are in some way related to the promotion's primary sales market. Choose popular forums. There is no point in wasting your time and energy on forums that few members and few posts. Page raking and the amount of active members are two good ways to check for this. Choose forums that allow sig tags. Read the rules before joining and pay attention to them.

You've Joined: now what?

Keep your sig tag short and update it regularly. The ideal thing is to limit yourself to one link, preferably to your main website. Never create posts that are nothing more than an advertisement. This is a universal rule. At best this kind of post will be deleted by the monitors, at worst, you will be banned. Be an active member on the forum. Plan to spend at least an hour each day there. Get to know the users. Iintroduce yourself with intelligent questions depending upon the forum's topic.

Use Your Sig file to the best advantage and within the rules. Some Forums have places where you can advertise and give special deals to members.

Social Bookmarking

In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are both accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

Social Bookmarking can bring immediate traffic to your website, as web 2.0 community websites such as Technorati, Digg, Reddit and Tailrank provide almost immediate information on various topics. These type of Bookmarking sites index and categorize content usually faster than the major search engines. People looking for the latest information on certain topics usually refer to these types of services.

Bookmarking Accounts to check out:

http://digg.com/
http://technorati.com/

You can increase your Bookmarking using the free submission site http://www.OnlyWire.com to bookmark many accounts at once. When you signup to OnlyWire.com you can use many bookmark accounts and with one simple procedure bookmark your blog post to all your accounts at once.

OnlyWire.com interfaces with:

Backflip
Bibsonomy
Blinklist
Blogmemes
Blue Dot
de.lirio.us
del.icio.us
Diigo
Furl
Jots
Linkroll
Looklater
ma.gnolia
Markaboo
Rawsugar
Shadows
Simpy
Spurl
Wink

If you don't have a Bookmark Account for the ones listed go and sign up.

Viral Traffic using free reports - ebooks etc.

Directory Submissions

Submit your website url's to the search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization, (SEO), is making web pages attractive to the search engines. The better optimized your web page is, the higher a ranking it will achieve in the search engines. Most people searching the internet only look at the first couple of search results.

So optimizing for the search engines focuses on techniques such as making sure that each web page is using the appropriate title tags and meta tags, and that the keyword or key phrases for the particular pages are distributed throughout the content. Search engines find and catalog web pages using spidering software.

These are just a few ways to get more web site traffic.

About the Author
John Leigh is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher, with a passion to help others. If you have your own affiliate program or web site and you want loads of people promoting your website or product and take your business to the next level, then visit http://www.yourvirtualaffiliatetrainer.com and take a look at the FREE comprehensive online training video, and http://yourvirtualaffiliatetrainer.wordpress.com/.

Chocolate Vs Green Tea - Which Offers You More?

Chocolate has always enjoyed a comfortable spot on most people's list of favorite foods and desserts. This is why recent studies on chocolates are focused on the health benefits of this "food of the gods." According to researchers chocolate contains up to four times the antioxidants found in tea. There are more than 300 chemicals found in chocolate that have different health benefits. One of these is flavonoids (also called flavonols) which found in gourmet chocolates. Flavonols is a type of polyphenol antioxidant which helps reduce risks of cardiovascular diseases. Another element found in chocolate that is similar to tea is called cathechins which is a primary bioflavinoid antioxidant. Cathechins is found to help reduce risks of heart attack and cancer as well as help repair damaged blood vessels by reducing inflammation.

Green tea, on the other hand, is the most consumed beverage worldwide next to water. It is classified under unfermented natural tea leaf and can either be steamed or dried. All teas come from one basic plant which is called the Camellia Sinensis plant. Teas differ according to how this plant is processed. To create green tea out of the Camellia Sinensis, the leaves are slightly withered and rapidly heated to produce teas that have lower caffeine and more subtle flavors. This kind of tea produces a greenish-gold drink. However, is chocolate healthier than green tea or vice-versa?

According to studies on the health benefits of chocolate, upon using special analytical techniques to test the antioxidant content of different beverages, they found out that the antioxidant concentration found in cocoa drink is twice as strong than that of red wine, twice or even thrice as strong than that of green tea, and four to five times stronger than that of black tea. You have the option to drink chocolate any way you want, but experts emphasize that it is better to drink hot cocoa than cold cocoa. Your body will more likely absorb the nutrients and antioxidants from chocolates when you drink hot cocoa. However, the value of antioxidants in chocolate is much higher than those found in raw cacao.

Comparing the catechins from chocolate and green tea, researchers have found that dark chocolate contains 53.5 mg of catechins per 100 grams while green tea contains 28 mg to 42 mg of catechins. This indicates that chocolates are healthier than green tea. However, if you choose to take your daily dose of antioxidants from chocolates, experts say that it is better to go with the drinkable stuff. They say that a 40-gram bar of plain chocolate contains around 8 grams of saturated fat compared to 0.3 grams in a cup of hot cocoa. So sip some chocolate and feel good about what you are doing for your body!

About the Author
Shannon O'Hara has been an entrepreneur for the last 10 years. She has a number of business ventures primarily in travel and food industries. Passionate about family, travel and chocolate - Shannon lives in the Mid-Atlantic so that she can see the ocean every day! Want to know the difference between dark chocolate vs. green tea?

Search Engine Optimization And Search Engine Crawlers

There is a lot to learn when it comes to online or internet marketing and search engine optimization. That is why a lot of people hire SEO consultants to worry about their internet marketing for them.

However, if you do not want to have to pay SEO experts to help you with the marketing of your website, then you may want to think about doing it yourself! It's not that hard, it just takes some reading on the internet from trusted sources. Really, most of the SEO services that are provided online are built around one thing, and that is search engine crawlers.

Today we are going to talk more about search engine crawlers, and what they do. Soon you will find out that pretty much everything that you do, as far as search engine optimization goes, is to make these little crawlers happy. It is no longer as easy as a quick search engine submission and your website becomes popular.

As you may be able to guess by the name, these search engine crawlers are little bots that roam around the internet looking for new websites and ranking them based on an algorithm. When they come across a new website, they rank it in different ways, taking many things in to consideration. These ranks help to determine where the site is going to end up in a search done on a search engine.

The first thing that you have to do for these crawlers is to get noticed by them, and that is the hardest part of SEO, or at least that is what SEO consultants want you to think! The truth of the matter is, you can get your website noticed by simply visiting different popular search engines and adding your URL to their submission forms.

You also must get links from other web sites pointing to your web site to obtain link popularity and credibility with the search engines. This way the crawlers will know where your site is at, and find it a lot quicker. They will also consider it a relevant source of information if other sites link to you.

After that, it's all about marketing your web site on the internet through search engine optimization techniques. These little crawlers are programmed to look for certain things on your web site, these are things that SEO experts study and have an understanding for.

Using the services of SEO Consultants to help in your marketing, however they can be very costly, so you should hire a service provider that is talented and can provide a portfolio to ensure you get quality work.

Before hiring someone to work on your web site you should make sure they use ethical search optimization and marketing tactics and also make sure that they can provide results.

The first thing that crawlers look for is, of course, keywords.

Keywords in your web sites content and keywords in the links pointing to your site. When it comes to search engine optimization, use keywords wisely. Don't over-saturate your web site with keywords because you can get docked as a spammer. These keywords have to be worked into the web page and not just listed there. You should integrate them in to your content, page titles, meta tags and URL. Also, it will help the marketing of your web site if you work them into the titles of your web page as well.

Also make sure that your main page headings are bigger than that of your normal font so the crawlers can easily pick out what the main focus of your page is.

SEO consultants also worry about how many links there are out there that point back to your website. The more links, the better. However they must also be quality links from popular sites that are credible with the search engines. That is why SEO experts are always looking for different places where they can post links to your website. While crawlers are looking around, if they come across links to your website, then that helps to boost your ranking online.

As you can see, SEO services are very helpful, but if you can learn how to do online marketing by yourself, you don't need to hire anyone.

About the Author
Joel McLaughlin - DataFlurry offers Affordable Search Engine Optimization & Marketing. We are a talented Phoenix Internet Marketing, Search Advertising Online Agency.

Should I Make a Down Payment? Do I Have To?

I am considering buying a home soon. Should I save up for a down payment or should I pursue low or no money down financing?

If you are wondering this, that's a very good question! The answer though will depend on your other fiscal and lifetime strategies and goals as well as your daily and monthly cash flow and other needs. Some new families or couples starting out choose to make a small down payment or none at all. It is important to understand that for the first 2, 3 or 4 years of a mortgage loan, the home owner is paying mostly interest on their mortgage loan anyway! Very little money if any traditionally gets applied toward the principle mortgage loan balance.
However, some choose to accelerate payments by paying extra either monthly or by choosing a bi-weekly mortgage. There are other ways to accelerate your equity if that's the strategy that makes sense for you.

Many 1st time buyers expect to only stay at their new home for a short period, say between 2 and 5 years. It is also noteworthy to examine how often the average consumer buys and sells a home (how often they move) as well as how often the average consumer keeps their existing mortgage financing in place. Sometimes, when conditions allow or needs arise, homeowners may refinance their loan to change their term, lower their interest rate or sometimes to borrow additional money. So, there is no one particular answer. It's not a case of one saddle fitting every horse when it comes to down payments. Some people need the extra monthly money more than they need to accelerate equity.

Also, stay educated on the facts about down payments and mortgage financing. Many media sources and others will have some believing that no 100% financing exists anymore, that every buyer needs 20% down "just like the old days" or "just like it should be", and that is quite far from the truth! Through USDA Rural Development and the VA, 100% financing is very much alive and always will be.

In conclusion, when considering how much to put down one must fully understand their own personal and lifetime strategies, their intentions or plans for the property and its future and be on the same page with their borrowing partner, if they have one. Also, it never hurts to run it by a Certified Financial Planner.

About the Author
Jamie Woods. For more, visit http://www.activerain.com/jpsunshine

Credit Card Money Savers - Just Flash The Card and Save Money!

The credit card has been known for quite some time now. When you are on a shopping spree, this may be the ultimate gear. This little plastic card may be your best friend.

This card may be the most convenient thing to use during your shopping and when you lack cash. This card at the same times tempts you to spend a lot.

So you may be wondering if there are ways to save money when you have a credit card. Of course you can.

This little piece if plastic may be very helpful. You actually can save money with the credit card.

A 0% balance transfer:

If the credit card you are using at the moment has high rates of interests, you can shift the balance to a card which has lower interest rates or may be even to those who might have no interest at all. Some of them may offer you a 0% interest rate for a while and then go on with charging you on lower rates which may be regular. If you were paying an interest of 19% you can shift down to one which provides 16.1%. this little difference will mean a lot to you in the long run.

Lower rates of interest:

Look out for those credit cards that provide you with the lowest rates of interest. This saves you a lot of money. if you do not have any savings, it is recommended that you go in for a card that has no annual fees. You will have to check on these before you make a decision as some of them who give you low rates of interest may not be affordable by you when they are combined with the fees that they take at the end of every year.

Rewards program:

Cash back programs and reward points are being offered now. Despite the fact that you buy frequently, you get a 5% off even when you are maintaining a low balance.

Increase your chance of experience:

You must always try to shun away from the drawbacks. If you are smart enough, you will head on the right track.

Make sure you have read all the details. You need to look at the penalty charges if you ever are late for the payment. Be cautious. Spending sometimes can not be avoided. Do try to make a good deal of what you can.

About the Author
Abhishek Agarwal is a financial expert and he has got some great Family Budget Secrets up his sleeves! Download his FREE 96 Pages Ebook, "Family Budget?Demystified!" from his website http://www.Trading-Masters.com/23/index.htm. Only limited Free Copies available.

Is your competition beating you with SEO?

You have optimized your website for winning keywords, are mid-way with your link building campaign, and have been going absolutely crazy creating fresh SEO friendly content that pleases the users and search engines.

You are obviously very serious about your online business, and yet you cannot seem to cross the Rank # 12, Page 2 barrier of Google search listing for your primary keywords.

A series of questions arise from the imaginary situation above:

1. Why is my ranking for the particular keyword not going up?
2. Am I missing out on any SEO strategies?
3. Maybe I am not building enough links? How much will be enough?
4. Do I have to improve my content quality?
5. The search engine has changed their algorithm (…again)
6. Others are using illegal SEO techniques

Now while one could go over the questions in your head, read up on latest search engine algorithms, contact a SEO expert, or blindly start buying links out of desperation, there is an easier way to find your answers.

Simply ask why are the other 10 websites ranking before your website?

Now that does not mean that the above questions 1 to 6 are not relevant, but simply put, one of the easiest ways to boost your search rankings is to study the top 5 to ten websites for your keyword and then apply what working for them into your own strategies.

Now I am not asking you to copy the competition or have a strategy that just involves beating the competition at the ranking game. It never works. What is needed is a better balance between your company's SEO strategies and of those of your competitors.

Like in any business strategy, you have to know your competitors, study what strategies they are using, and then apply the best of those strategies to your own game plan.

In the same way, in defining the SEO path ahead for your website you must analyze your competition. What are they doing to rank in the top 10 that you are not doing? After all those websites are listed on the top for a reason, and they are applying SEO strategies that the search engine in particular seems to like.

Now while finding the answers to those questions in the real business world may be difficult, in the online world all you have to do is to right-click and view the source of the page.

The below simple steps will open up a world of information to you.

1. Does the domain name contain the keyword? If the link is a sub domain then does the sub domain contain the keyword?

2. In what Meta tags, title, etc has the competition placed their keywords?

3. Does the link name contain the keyword? eg. www.seo-optimization-experts.com/mumbai-seo-expert.html

4. How many keywords are listed in the keyword tag i.e. is the page focused around one or two keywords, or is it a jumble of keywords listed out.

5. Is the title and description captivating enough? How has the keyword/s been placed in the title and description and at what position?

6. Is the page graphic intensive? Is the site using a lot flash or active server pages? Search engines cannot understand graphics, only the text it can read on the page. Make sure there is a good balance between the graphics and content.

7. How long is the body text? Writing 400 to 600 words is normally fine.

8. Has the keyword (keyword weight) been used appropriately in the body content? Ideally the first 25 words of content should be keyword rich, and the keyword should appear after every 100 words in remaining content.

9. Is the content interesting to you as the reader? Does the content follow a theme? Is the content relevant to what keyword the page has been optimized for?

10. What is the page rank of the page (You can check page rank of any website by downloading the Google Toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com.

11. Which is the first place in the source code the keyword appears?

12. Has the keyword been used appropriately in headline tags and link text?

13. Does the site use java script, tables, frames, dynamic content, CMS etc?

14. Is the page focused around a theme?

15. How many inbound links are there to the page? You can check the link popularity of the page on www.marketleap.com? Visit the sites that have given the link. What is their page rank? What is the link text that describes the link to the website? Has the keyword been used in the link text?

16. How many pages does the site have?

17. Does the site have a good site map that lists all the content pages, videos on the site that search engine spiders can crawly easily?

18. Are there any 404 errors on the website?

19. What is the domain name extension e.g. .com,. net, .edu, .co.in

20. How long has that domain name been in existence? Search engines rank those sites better that have been around for a while, or those that plan to be around for a while?

21. How many directories has that page/website been submitted to?

22. Has the site used any spamming or illegal SEO techniques like keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text, duplicate content and other such spam techniques? If yes you can inform the search engine of the same but do so with caution. For Google: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

Please note that sometimes you will find no reasons why the competitors' website is ranked above yours. And that's ok. I have experienced many cases of certain sites which go against the search engines guidelines (set by search engines themselves), and yet they rank above meticulously optimized pages.

Search engines are constantly trying to remove badly optimized or spam pages which offer little or no value to the users. Our intent here is not to focus on the missing pieces/loopholes of search engines algorithms or isolated instances of sites that don't deserve it and yet are ranking high, but to work within the framework and guidelines for the long haul.

By mapping out the answers to the above questions (preferable on a spread sheet), you will find the overall patterns of what is working for those sites and why, and then figure out ways to modify your SEO strategies to improve your rankings.

About the Author
Nevil Darukhanawala - SEO Expert http://seo-optimization-experts.com/seoblog.html Zen of SEO Now what has search engine optimization and search marketing got to do with spirituality? Am sure the Big Search Engines will be laughing all the way to the very end...

Your Own Business - 7 Tips Before You Start

To have your own business often seems to be the ultimate. The grass is, however, not always greener on the other side. It is important not to be blinded by the potential rewards. Do you have what it takes? You need the right skills, determination, financial backing, etc. There are also several serious and potential fatal risks. The following tips act as a guideline before you start your own business:

1. Make sure that entrepreneurship is for you. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone. If you feel safer in your comfort-zone and are risk-averse the chances are that you are better off where you are - nothing wrong with that. Entrepreneurship needs passion, a certain amount of risk-taking and the motivation and dedication to succeed when everything seems to be against you.

2. Understand the risks. Financial risk, including potential bankruptcy, is a real threat if things go wrong. Less obvious risks include social-, career- and psychological risks.

3. Build a support structure. To have your own business can be quite tough at times. The more support you have the bigger the chances of surviving these times. It is worthwhile to make an effort to get your family and friends positive about the business.

4. Get the right partners. It is often not advisable to embark on a business on your own (or even impossible). Good synergy between partners can drastically increase the potential of a business. Unfortunately many business partnerships don't work and are often disastrous. Choose your partners very careful and ensure that legal contracts are in place for any potential "divorce" in the future.

5. Prepare diligently. To have your own business generally means a lot of hard work. This should start with a proper feasibility study and business planning. Is there a big enough gap in the market that your business can fill? How will you do it? How will it be funded?

6. Be realistic. A new business is never just moonshine and roses. It tends to take much longer than expected to breakeven and it needs much more resources (especially financially) than normally planned for. Reflect this in your cashflow planning.

7. Get expert advice. When you lack specific skills it is much cheaper to pay for it in the beginning rather than later when the business does not work. The advice of auditors, attorneys, bankers, consultants and other experts should be sought where applicable.

About the Author
Wim Venter is the CEO of Ventex Corporation, a business development consultancy. To receive more information on starting your own business and other business related topics (articles, case studies and tips) sign up for our free newsletters.