Before you begin to develop your website, or even before you purchase your domain, you need to have a good understating about the market that your website is belong to.

The first thing that I do is to check how many competitors there are within my website niche.

Lets take this website as an example: This website is talking about SEO and SEO tools that can help you with the time consuming tasks. One of my goals is to be ranked in a high position for the phrase “SEO Tools” . Lets check how many competitors we have out there. I use Google search engine as the source to my answers. At Google just click “seo tools”

As you can see there are 50,400,000 websites that meet this phrase criteria. I am sure that we all agree that it’s a huge number of websites. Based on this information we cannot jump into conclusions about the effort that will be required to be ranked high for this phrase. The next thing that I will do is to try to figure how well those website are optimized for the phrase. I will also try to estimate the kind of SEO effort that my competitors are doing in order to be ranked high.

I will use the Google “allinachore” operator in order to learn how many websites have back links using the “SEO Tools” as their anchor text. I am not looking for those who have back links with those words includes in it, but those who have this exact phrase as a back link anchor text. For this purpose I will type: allinanchor:”seo tools”

Hmm…. interesting. Although we’ve got 50,400,000 websites in the SERP (search results page) we only have 37,200 website that have the “seo tools” phrase as their anchor text.

Now I would like to check how my webmasters are using “SEO Tools” as their website title. Here again I will use another one of Google’s operators. I will type allintitle:”seo tools”

Now we’ve got 76,400 websites.

Let me tell you this. From my experience if you find a niche market with millions of websites listed, however, only few thousands are include for a specific phrase using the “allinachore” and “allintitle” operators, you actually found a phrase that will be relatively easy to get a high ranking for it.

But…. Does based on this information only, can a website owner make a purely business decision whether to put any SEO effort in order to to get a high position at the SERP for a giving phrase. You probably thinking in your mind that if I am mentioning this dilemma then there must be something behind my question. Well there is. In the next article I will explain about the other side of the equation and what you need to know in order to take that kind of a decision.

Yesterday I’ve got an email from a person named Josh who asked my attention to the fact that I did not explain the all process from scratch. Thank you very much Josh. I looked back and I totally agree with you.

To make things more clear, I would like to start my journey with you my readers right from the start. In the next articles I will tell about most of the things that you need to be aware of before you launch your website. You will need to analyze the market of your website in order to get a better understating about the following aspects:

* How many competitors your have.

* What is the effort that will be needed in order to make your website rank high.

* What the role of the domain name in this game and how it can infect your ranking.

* Where to host your website.

All of this aspect you should take into consideration before you launch your website. Some of this elements are very critical for your SEO success. Planing your strategy right from the start can help you to speed up the process. Its not that you can’t fix things during this non-ending marathon. However, avoiding some of the common mistakes can definitely differentiate your website from the others.

Let me get my coffee and we will get started ;)

I chose to introduce my new website at SEO forums. Thought it might looks an obvious step for some of you allow me to tell a few words about that point.

Every link that you have on other website that point to your website can be consider as a vote. The more vote that you have the more the search engines will give creditability to your website. However, its very important to make sure that your website will have some quality back links from relevant website. For example: if you have a niche website dealing with baking tips there is no sense for looking after back links from sport websites. Though a back link is still a vote, but a back link from a relevant website will get more weight at the overall result that the search engines algorithm calculate.

You will be surprised how many times I meet website owners that puts lots of effort getting tons of back links from other website that are irrelevant to their website topic. Save your time, in most cases it will do no differences to your ranking. In some radical situation it can also harm your website ranking. On this and other things you need to be aware of I will write in the next coming days. I will show you how do I find a good potential websites to list your website at.

So…. as you can see the website in online.

What next then…..?

The first step that every website owner should do is to make sure his website will be indexed by the search engines. Back in the old days we used to fill a form, applying to list our website in the search engines. This days you can skip this step, some will claim that its even better not to use the site submission form. The proffered approach is to grab the search engines attention in a “natural” way: include your website on others, already indexed, websites.

All the top search engines try to find a pattern that will give them a reliable indication that your website is popular. Your website popularity is one of the major factors to be ranked high. Its not the only major factor, but again, one of the most important. When your website appears on other website it get voted. Relevant to our current discussion is the fact that once your website is listed on other indexed websites, your websites is actually been presented to the world, including to the search engines crawlers. Yep.. you got it right, when the crawlers meet your website they will come to visit it as well… the result is simple, your website will get indexed. It can take between three days up to two weeks. In most cases its all depends about the frequency that the crawlers scan the website where you list your website.

So I did… I used some of the SEO forums that I familiar with in order to present my new venture. Just make sure not to spam. I can tell that some of the forums that I signed up, blame me for spam. Some others welcome my venture with open hands. At the end of the day, I believe that if you have something to offer, the forums moderator will not stick their leg on your way.

Why I chose SEO forms to start with and what will be my next move ….. read later on.

When I first started to deal with SEO not many tools were available in the market.

Actually back in the “old days” most of the websites owners did not predict what the search engines, and mostly Google, are about to bring to the world. In a way, you felt in the air that something is about to be changed.

As soon as webmasters realized the power of been ranked high at search engine a big struggle started. We are still in the middle of it: A struggle that probably will never end: The webmasters who would like their website to be ranked high and will do almost anything to achieve a good position in a SERP (Search engine results page), while on the other side there are the search engines who try to deliver the most accurate results to the end user.

So… back then we tried to do what so called “reverse engineering”. We tried to figure out why a website is been ranked high while others are not. Sound simple? well indeed in the “old days” it wasn’t hard mission to accomplished. You had to find the right parameters that a search engine is “inspecting” and then to act accordingly.

You will be surprised, but this days the process is pretty mush the same, but with huge different: Back then you had to face with only few parameters. This days there are hundreds and even thousands of parameters that are been taken into consideration at the top 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo & MSN).

It become very hard to track about all the parameters. Very quickly some “SEO software” started to pop up in the market, promising you their way to be ranked #1.

Although I truly believe in SEO, and also believe that most of the websites can be ranked high as much as its owners want it to be ranked, but don’t get wrong on this: No kind of a software can guarantee to be ranked at #1.

All the SEO software that you will find in the market are just a tool to make your SEO work easier to handle. You will find that there are some procedures that you will want to run on a daily basis. For those kind of task those software are great. They simplify your work and allow you to achieve your goal in a reasonable effort during the day.

Remember, Although some of them are pretty sophisticated tools, yet, they are just tools. You need to learn how to handle them right and what to actually do with them.

Later on I will tell more about the SEO tools that I am using and how they will help me to promote this website.

1-800-seo-tools - The ins and out of search engine optimization (SEO)