The greatest struggle for any website or blog is tapping into the traffic of major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. If you are able to rank well for competitive terms you will be able to bring in plenty of traffic and begin making money online. Search engine optimization will begin before you even start creating your web presence. The first thing you should know is the keywords you want to rank well for and the traffic that these keywords are receiving monthly. The only accurate checker I have found is Google Adwords Keyword Tool which you can find at adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. To start checking keywords with this tool you will first need to decide what you are going to create your web presence about. The topic of your website or blog should be something that you are both extremely passionate about and something you know at least a little about so you can write intelligently on the subject adding to the niche.

Once you have a topic chosen the next step will be thinking about what people will type into Google to find your web presence. If for example you are extremely interested in XBOX then some of the keywords you should check is "XBOX", "XBOX blog", "XBOX Reviews", and "XBOX Games". As you search for these individually in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool it will bring up the traffic for the term you type in and the traffic of 99 related terms. You should look through these terms to find the highest traffic and optimize your website for them. Usually you can optimize one page of your website for two to three terms. The first page that you should optimize is your main page or index page. Now that you have your keywords chosen it is time to begin the creation of your website around these keywords. Personally I recommend setting up a blog over at blogger.com or wordpress.com. The reason I recommend starting a blog is when you write a blog post you can optimize each post for a long tailed keyword related to your niche.

When you create your website or blog the first thing you will want to optimize is the URL. You can either place the exact term as your URL or add it with other words. One good example of this is if you are creating an internet marketing blog and want to rank for the term "internet marketing blog" rather than just having the term as your URL you could add your name like this "Kris’s Internet Marketing Blog". This will let you have the term that you would like to rank well for as well as your name for branding. Once you have the URL set up the next step of optimization is choosing a title which has the term and accurately describes what the user will find on your website or blog. You should also focus on the meta title, meta description, headings, and content on your website or blog. Before you go crazy with the keyword you should understand that when Google comes to your website they will read it almost as well as a visitor meaning if you are only putting terms down for Google repeating the same words over and over Google will quickly pick this up and either ban your website or drop it down deep into the index. You do need the keyword, but also need to have the website very readable.