Note: Before you begin, if you're NOT 100% serious about getting your website to the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN, don't read another word. Only read on if you plan to put everything I will be teaching you into action.

If you're anything like I was when I first began online, you've probably created a brand new website. Then submitted it to a few search engines and hoped that people would mysteriously show up at your site and buy whatever it is you were selling.

After a couple of weeks go by and only a few stray people show up at your website, you decide to try and "optimize" your website around your main keyword in hopes that you just might rank well in 1 of the millions of search engines. Another couple of weeks go by and still no luck.

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've probably figured out by now, this is not the way to go about doing things.

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 is.

In our example, let's create a weight loss related website. Before we start creating and collecting content for the website, we need to do a little keyword research. This is VERY important and should not be skipped. To do our keyword research we need to visit a few websites.

The first of which should be:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

They have a very good keyword tool, and best of all it's free! Once we are there, we can enter the most generic keyword for our website into the keyword selector tool. In our example, our keyword would be "weight loss". We get 570179 searches for the month of June 2006.

Now that's a lot of demand for 'weight loss' just on the past month of June 2006! But that's not all. What about the supply for that hungry demand of people looking for weight loss information, pills, programs, etc?

Well, the way to do that, and by the way this is called finding your competition. Go to Google and type the following (without the quote marks'): "allinanchor:weight loss".

Now notice on google where is says 'Results 1 - 10 of about 8,740,000 for allinanchor:weight loss' Now this is what I call, some SERIOUS competition for the 'weight loss'. If you are just starting and want to use this keyword to optimize your website, forget it! Yes, demand is high, but your supply, or competition, is so high that you can't even consider optimizing your website for that particular keyword.

So what's the answer then? How do I search for high demand but at the same time less competitive keywords? Very simple. I can give you some off hand data but I have to tell you that now a day SEO (Search Engine Optimization) got even easier with a new tool.
SEO Elite V3.2

You can take a keyword with a demand of about 500 to 30,000 searches a month using overture keyword tool mentioned above. Yes you could take one which has over 30,000 searches if you have an unusual supply or competition which is lower than the requirement.

Using 'allinanchor:keyword' on Google you expect to have a search result of 15,000 or less in order to say that you are on safe ground to optimize your website and rank higher, faster and easier.

Let's review this next example, look on overture down to 'dotties weight loss zone' with 4777 searches last month, nice demand!, now lets see our supply or competition for this particular keyword using 'allinanchor:dotties weight loss zone' on Google. Now you can see what we get: 'Results 1 - 10 of about 622 for allinanchor:dotties weight loss zone' So what does this mean? You got it! GO FOR IT! 622 is so low that you are certainty going to rank high and fast doing proper use of that keyword on your website.

So there you have it. Always do Step 1 and if it is a pass, move to step 2 and if that is a pass, use it, if it doesn't pass, go back to step 1 and find another keyword with proper demand and move on to step 2 again. Meet those two very important requirements and you will be able to start the right way. I also encourage you to find out a lot more by visiting the website below at my bio section.

Good luck on your SEO!

Al Castillo