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The first step of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) you should undertake prior to writing the content for your website is to undertake keyword analysis to determine the most effective keywords and keyword phrases to target. This can be achieved by finding those keyword phrases which have the most amount of monthly searches combined with the least competition. This can be achieved by searching in Google for the keyword phrase, and then using the Overture Keyword Tool to find out how many monthly searches are made per phrase. Some searches receive many thousands if not millions of searches per month. These are typically very competitive one word phrases such as "music" or "shopping" - some companies have to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds to achieve high rankings for these keywords. "It is much better to be number one for a lower volume keyword phrase than to have a ranking of 500 for a high volume phrase." If you don't want to spend that much (understandably!), then you should try and target 'niche phrases' which are typically two to four words long. The aim is to be more specific, for example if you sell flowers in Dorset then you should perhaps target phrases such as "Dorset flowers", "flowers Dorset", "Dorset florist" etc.. Once you have found some lucrative phrases, you should aim to target no more than 3 or 4 keyword phrases per web page. So if your website consists of 5 pages then choosing around 15 keywords to target would be about the right number. The next step is to see how easy it will be to gain a first page ranking... Go to Google, and type in your keyword phrase and hit the search button. Then, go to the SiteStats tool found here and enter the first ten web addresses that appear underneath the listings on the Google search page (an example of where the web address appears is shown highlighted red in the image below): 
For now you don't need to worry about most columns in the SiteStats tool, but you should make a note of the column headed "PR" (short for Google PageRank) and the one headed "YIL" (short for Yahoo Inbound Links). An explanation of PageRank (PR) can be found in a separate article, but the YIL column shows the amount of links that a website has pointing to it from other websites (for those contained in Yahoo). Consequently as these are the top ten websites for your keyword phrase, when putting into practice the article about "link building", you should aim to reach that level of links. It is important, however, to note that it is quality as well as the quantity of inbound links that determines your ranking. Of course there are other factors that influence your ranking in the search engines (most notably the content of your website), and these will be described later in this Website Promotion Guide.
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