No matter what anyone tells you, the first step you need to take if you want to set up your business’s website is to first determine the goal for what you want to use your website for.

If you already have a brick and mortar business and you are planning on expanding its reach to the internet, then you are off to a good start. On the other hand, if you are starting from scratch, and a business website is going to be your sole moneymaker, then you have a lot of work ahead of you.

Because there are more steps involved for those who are looking to make an online business from scratch, we will start at the beginning. Your first step when creating a business website is to brainstorm what it is exactly that you want your business to provide.

A sales or retail website will look different than a marketing website which will look different than an informational website, and they will all look different than a web application. Your primary concern should be to first determine a genre for your business’s website. Everything else will fall into place once you have the basic ideas laid out for your site.

Each type of business site has its own pros and cons. For example, a sales or retail website will have a lot of pictures, sporadic text that is mostly used to describe each product you are selling in a sentence or two, and a shopping cart.

These sites feature easy navigation and are very user friendly, but they are more difficult to get recognized by search engines and normally do not take advantage of advertising. Affiliate programs can be used, however, for extra traffic.

On the other hand, a marketing website is designed to sell one product and one product only. You’ve probably seen a number of marketing websites attempting to sell you get rich quick schemes, web content, and handy Photoshop plug-ins to make web design easier.

These sites are the easiest to design and build, feature mostly text with a few images interspersed, and contain a simple “Buy Now” button. They are designed around one product and one product only, making them optimized for search engines and perfectly positioned to make money through advertising and affiliate programs.

The informational business website is next. These are sites designed to inform about a business, but not necessarily sell anything directly. Think of some of the biggest companies in the world: Sony, Motorola, Canon, Toyota, Chevrolet, etc. While you can buy items on some of their corporate websites, they are primarily designed to inform the consumer.

By informing the consumer about your brand or store, you can help get the word out about your products and increase your sales dramatically. These websites, while they can work for anyone who has a well-defined product to sell, are better for companies and small businesses that have a nationwide presence.

In other words, it is not a good idea to make an informational website for your local business when you will only get a few site visitors a month – if that. Do not confuse these informational websites with Adsense Sites. The two are distinct.

Finally, if you really want to make a name for yourself on the Internet, you can consider taking a route that few dare to tread. You could create a web-based application that functions like a traditional program, but is located on the internet. These programs can often give you a channel to make a significant amount of money, provided that people find the applications you create useful.

However, they do require a lot of perseverance, a very original idea, and a good team of programmers who want the product to succeed. While a web application based business is a fantastic way to make a lot of money, it is not recommended for those who are new to the business arena.

Now that you know the four basic types of business websites, it is up to you to choose the one that will most work for your goals. You do not, and should not, decide right now which type of site is the best for you.

Take your time, do some research, and make sure that you talk everything through with your business partners and/or your immediate family members who may be counting on you to make the right decision.

When you plug the keyword into Google using quotation marks, there are a couple of things that you want to take note of.

 What kind of sites are ranking high (are they authority sites?)
 How many Adwords campaigns are being run (pay attention)
 How many competing sites without quotation marks

The first bullet point above is probably the most important. This is true because it is going to be our goal to take over their position if they are on the first page of Google. Therefore, we have to see exactly how strong they are. This will tell us how much work we will have to put in for us to rank well there a firefox plugin I use called SeoQuake
which I recommend for this purpose but im not going into that now.

One of the best indicators to me can be found by using Yahoo Site Explorer. Basically, we will be able to find out exactly how many links the site has coming in and exactly where they are coming from.

For the purpose of an example lets go back and use the keywords from the relationship niche that we found earlier.

One of the first keywords we found was “relationship problem advice” so, lets take a look at exactly what Google will tell us so that we can analyze it a little bit further.

When you plug the keyword into Google with quotation marks it shows that there are 6,970 competing sites at the time of this post Now, take a look at the Adwords Ads that are running. 100% full page of ads on the side and at the top.

So far, we are looking real good. We have low competition and 21 people are spending money to get traffic from this particular keyword.

Lets take it a step further though and analyze what the sites that already have top billing have going on. We are going to do this by analyzing what kind of links they have coming in and where they come from.

To do this, we are going to use Yahoo Site Explorer. So, open Yahoo up in a different tab. Make sure that Google is still open with the information regarding the keyword “relationship problem advice”

The first site you should see is www.links2love.com/advice.htm go ahead and open that site up and you will see that the site does not really offer any good content. Honestly, it looks like it is set up to generate income through Adsense. So, we should be happy about that.

Copy the URL and click over to your Yahoo tab. Once there we are going to see how many links the site has by putting it in the Yahoo search bar in the following format:

http://www.links2love.com/advice.htm

Hit enter, what you see next usually is a bad sign. It is showing that the site has over 4,000 links pointing to it. However, in this case, if you look close enough they are all internal links. This means that pretty much all of the links are coming from other pages on the site. Usually when I see that, I take that as a good sign.

After evaluating the first site, I’m not too worried. I’m fairly confident with a little bit of work, that first spot is attainable and I could have it with some patience.

Take a look at the second competing result in Google and lets analyze it the same way. The site you should be looking at is www.couplescompany.com when you plug it into Yahoo in the same way we just done previously, you will see that it has over 2,000 links pointing to it. However, again most of the links are coming from within the site with the exception of a couple of directories.

Another site with a couple thousand links pointing to it is not exactly what I wanted to see. However, because of where the links are coming from, I’m not that worried about it either.

Just to do a little more investigation, lets do the same thing with the third site on the front page of Google. The URL that you should see is a URL within www.askmen.com when you run it through site explorer you will see that there are 11,139,699 links pointing to it.

The fourth competing site has 143 the same stats as the rest.

From everything I have seen this is a keyword that I feel comfortable attacking with a fair amount of certainty that I can not only rank on
the first page of Google, but that I can rank high on the first page. Therefore, I am going to put it aside as a good keyword to go after.

You are going to want to go through this process for each of the keywords that you have compiled. Make sure that you do this!

Incomplete or sloppy research very well could hurt you in the long run.

Once you get it down, it shouldn’t take you any longer than a couple of minutes per keyword and you will be done a lot faster than you think. Even though it might seem tedious, this is part of the ground work that you lay down to ensure that your campaign is successful.

No matter what you do, do not skip what we have talked about in this section. If you do, you could end up wasting a ton of time on keywords that are unattainable or even worse spending time ranking well for a keyword that is not profitable.