After you have spent hours of your time creating a home page, it is certainly disheartening when no one visits your site, or the traffic is so minimal that it might as well be nonexistent. At this point you probably give up and decide to either build another website around a different target market or just lose all hope and quit. Well, news flash, as you have probably figured out by now, this is not the way to go about doing things.

You can register with search engines till your fingers won't type anymore, but unless you truly understand how search engines work and how to use their indexing features, you are wasting your time.

Let me give you a specific example of what your very first steps MUST be when creating any website... no matter what the subject matter.

I will use a handbag related website as an example. Before you start creating and collecting content for the website, you need to do a little keyword research. This is VERY important and should not be skipped. To do your keyword research, go to: goodkeywords.com.

They have a very good keyword tool, and best of all it's free! Once you have downloaded this software, you can enter the most generic keyword for a website into the software. In our example, our keyword would be "handbag". Good Keywords will return a list of related terms. The "count" column will then show us how many times the specific keyword has been searched for the previous month within the Overture.com search engine. Generally, you can multiply that number by 8, in order to estimate the number of times that keyword has been searched within Google for the previous month.

The task is to find which multiple keyword combination most clearly matches your site's intent and yield few enough documents in searches that you will be able to attain rankings. These are your "power combinations." You will rarely want to target single keywords even if a single keyword is what you really want, you may not be able to attain a search engine ranking on it. For a brand new website, you might better use your time to pair the keyword with something more specific. More specific keywords have the added advantage of ensuring that your prospects are more qualified. Besides, given the millions of documents indexed in the Web and the number of possible ways to interpret a single keyword, a single keyword can be more misleading than helpful.

Do NOT start off by choosing highly competitive keywords to optimize. Why, you ask? If a keyword is highly competitive (more then 5,000 searches for the previous month) then 10 times out of 10, the competition you will have to outrank will be extremely fierce. This is not something you should try to take on right away.

Let's use the handbag website as an example. "Handbag" by itself does not target any specific audience. It is too broad. A search on "handbag" at almost any search engine will return over 30 million other websites (web pages)! I don't know about you, but that's an lofty goal to start with. If you scroll down, you can find some more specific keywords to pair with handbag like "discount" or "discount leather," to gain real meaning.

These could be possible keywords you should target to begin with. Once you have your list of 3 to 4 keywords, you need to go to Google and check out the competition to see exactly how hard it will be to optimize for the specified keyword.

You will want to evaluate the page ahead of yours by literally clicking on their listings, visit their site, and select View from the pull-down menu in your browser and then Document Source in Netscape Navigator, or Source in Microsoft Internet Explorer. This allows you to view the actual HTML, code that makes up their page and see if the sites above you are actually optimizing their "onpage optimization factors."

As you view the source file from your competitors, you need to look for a few things. Ask yourself, "Is a particular keyword more prominent in their Title tag than in Mine?" If this page has a keyword in the third position, make sure your Title tag has a keyword in the third position. If their page has the keyword twice in the title, in position three and seven, you do the same without copying their Title tag. If their page has 264 words of copy, write 264 word of copy. If their 264 word of copy contains three occurrences of the targeted keyword, yours should have three, and so on.

Ok, now we know how to out optimize the top ranking sites.... at least for all the onpage optimization factors that Google deems as important.

Remember, the main idea behind ranking well on Google is to analyze the top ranked websites and then do those things that they're doing, BUT just a little better to one up them, which will lead to a better ranking. In theory, you can build a page that is identical to theirs in format. However, the search engine will treat the two pages differently depending on what other ranking factors the engine considers such as link popularity.