It's not that useful to be ranked #1 for a keyword that only gets 5 searches a month. Similiarly, it is very hard to achieve high rankings for high traffic keyphrases because there is going to be a lot of competition.

Trim your keyword phrase list down to 50-100 entries and get ready for step 3.

3. Analyze Competitor's Backlinks

While I will walk you through how to do all of required analysis tasks using free tools I highly recommend investment in some form of SEO software or service. The tasks you will have to perform today can be time consuming and a little monotonous so help of an outside resource may prove invaluable to you.

The purpose of this analysis is to find potential link partners (to be used in a later lesson), and to trim our "master keyword list" down to our 15-20 keywords that we want to get high rankings for.

Take each of 50-100 keyphrases in your master keyword list and perform a search on google.com for each term.

We are only going to be interested in "top 10" results for each keyword phrase since our goal is to get listed on first page of results for our target keywords.

Traffic to your site will drop dramatically if your listing does not appear on first page of search engine results.

Our goal from this analysis is to find out how "established" your competition is. This can be accomplished by analyzing number of websites that link to your competitor's website.

To find number of incoming links for any website perform following search from yahoo.com (Please note I have chosen Yahoo because Google no longer reports accurate back link results).

http://www.yahoo.com

linkdomain:www.competitordomain.com

Note: you could use http://www.uptimebot.com for a more comprehensive listing which includes results from all major search engines.

This will tell you how many websites link to domain "competitordomain.com". Search engine's use this "link popularity" number to gauge how important a website is. A site with a lot of links to it must be an information hub and therefore very important.

Perform this linkdomain command for all of "top 10" competitors you have identified for each your chosen keyword phrases in your master keyword list.

If you find that sites in search results have several 1000 backlinks to them you will know right away that you are going to have a hard time getting a high ranking for that keyword since a large number of links suggests that site is already well established.

Make 10 columns in your master keyword list for each keyword that you analyze indicating what number of backlinks are for each of top 10 search results.

Also copy any URL's that offer services that would be complimentary (not a competitor) for what you will be promoting on your website into your keyword list as well.

We will use this information in a future lesson to help boost your seach engine positioning by requesting to trade links with these complimentary sites.

Simply noting them down in your keyword list will be sufficient for our purposes today.

4. Refine Your Keyword List Part 2

Based on your backlink analysis trim your keyword list down to 15-20 keywords you think you will be able to compete for. If there are already a number of established "hubs" for a particular keyword you may have to drop it from your list.

Using these tips you should now be able to tell which market's you will be able to compete in and which one's already have too many established information hubs to make it worth your while. You will also have a list of "complimentary" websites that we will be requesting links from in a future lesson to help boost our own "link popularity".

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Michael Lawrence is the webmaster for Cobrasurf.com

What Search Engine Optimization does is make your web site more appetizing to search engines, and make your site more important to them.

How is it done? That is a long subject that is addressed briefly in other articles:

Can you SEO your own site? Yes of course you can. Follow those articles and I’ll guarantee your rankings will improve, but my recommendation is to leave it to an expert. Doing it yourself is like trying to build a deck armed only with a screwdriver and a knife. You can get there, but its going to be a frustrating experience.

An SEO expert can save you an immense amount of time, trial and error and frustration, as they have right tools for job.

Oh, one more piece of advice. If you see an organization promising to get you a top ten listing for $10 a month……RUN! It can’t be done ethically for that amount of money, and search engines are just as likely to ban your site as to list it highly - you have been warned!!