Test the Market

In an ever competetive online marketplace, it's becoming increasingly difficult to obtain good search engine rankings. I speak from personal experience as a web designer, because when you type "web designer" into Google you get hundreds of millions of websites returned, however if you type in "websites for personal trainers" Google brings back a mere 1 million search results.

You have to bear in mind that it takes Google 6-8 weeks just to list your website, never mind listing it on a page where your customers are going to ever see it.

The place to start is your keywords. Take your time to make a list of all of the possible keywords in your market sector and include any mispellings. You'll be suprised how many people search on mispelled keywords. If you like, use a keyword tool like Wordtracker.

Think about your business and it's demographic, do most of your customers live locally or are they nationwide? Which market are they in? These factors could help you find the particular niche keywords that people would use to find your business on the web.

Spend an hour on Google, Yahoo and MSN using your keywords to test how many results there are and if your well into the tens of millions, then you can assume that it's going to be a tough, time consuming and costly market to get into.

Design your website using your niche keywords

Once you know your keyword niche market, write content for each webpage using the keywords that you want to target. This part is where so many web design firms and their clients go wrong. By not considering your keywords at the start of the process, it can prove very costly in time and investment later and any good web designer with search engine optmisation experience should be ensuring that this does not happen.

Launch Your Adwords Campaign

Once you have your list of niche keywords and your great looking, keyword targeted website and you know your marketplace, then set-up a trial run Google Adwords campaign. Google Adwords is the best choice to start, because it is easy to use in comparison with Yahoo Overture or MSN.

Start off with a low daily budget and analyse your pay per click campaign a couple of times a week to see how many searches and clicks are being carried out under particular keywords.

Don't neglect Organic Search Engine Optimisation

O.K. you've got your website and your pay per click campaign and you've had some success from it and got yourself some new customers, but you're thinking to yourself "Lets go after some more popular keywords."

This is where the real work begins. Again, it's about analysis and re-analysis of your market and your niche keyword choices.

Set-up another Google Adwords campaign using more popular keywords and analyse the results after 1 week. Then, choose the most popular ones and conduct a search on Google to see how many results are returned.

Be realistic though and realise that it can take many years worth of link building and content writing, among other things, to see any real organic results from search engines.