Before any work can be done on getting your site listed or optimized for the search engines, some basic research needs to be done.
What needs to be done is to …

Think like your (potential) Customers
We need to find out what search terms your customers will use to try to locate the services or products you offer.
We will spend some time together with you (and your team) going thru possible search words and phrases that would be used by potential customers searching for your products and or services on the web.
Please carefully fill out the questionnaire at the bottom of this page.
We will use this information to carefully position your site in the various search engines and directories on the World Wide Web.
The words and descriptions you choose will appear in many places so choose carefully.

1. Name at least 3 of your direct competitors and their web site addresses
   Your list of competitors will be used for a variety of functions.
   Keyword research – we will investigate which keywords your competition uses and carefully compare these words and phrases to the ones chosen on this work-sheet. We will assess the competitive activity around these terms. We will research and investigate how your competitors Rank in the search engines based on these keywords.
2. Carefully Construct a Tile Phrase for your site
   This can be no longer than 60 or 70 chars and will be used for the title of the site as well as for all directory and other listings where a site title is required.
   A prime place where this text will appear is the Blue Bar at the very top of the screen when browsing to a site using Internet Explorer. (Note this is ALWAYS the FIRST TEXT that appears for any site you browse to.) The search engines will always index these words alongside your web address (URL). It is a VERY IMPORTANT piece of text!
3. Describe your business and its products or services in no more than 200 characters. (Business Description)
4. Create an Initial List of Keywords that customers would use to find your services.
   Questions to answer can be like these samples:
   Who would look for our services?
   What will be sold on our site?
   What problems do my products solve?
   Who currently uses our services?

• All over the site
• For all directory listings
• For social networking listings
• For Google Maps
• For site submissions

1. NB: Make sure that the correct Country and language is chosen before you start researching.
2. Enter the keywords from the questionnaire
3. Click Get Keyword Ideas
4. Study the results and look for LOW Competitive scores. These are good bets to start using.

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