A Check list so far. You have your product/service/sage advice , you have a domain name selected, you have checked to see what the market is like, you have an idea of what you want your site to look like and contain in the form of content.
Before you go to much further you need to look at the top 10 sites on each of the big search engines. In most cases you will find many of the same sites, but you should see at least 20 different sites between Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Time to really look at these sites. What makes those pages show up first? Are they content rich or eye candy rich? Are they the big boys of the industry? All of the sites should have common elements. Those common element are what makes them a top site. Go through the sites. If you need to look at the source code for the page. The all have elements that make them top, what they have done is what needs to be done to make you a top site.
In most cases you will easily see the common elements. Usually it’s because they are the Big Boys of the industry who get mentioned in news papers, or other media out lets. We will get into the value of getting links from important sites as a method of gaining popularity and importance for the search engines.
If you have the money there are companies like mine that can for a fee examine the top sites track information about them and report back to you the common elements we think are making them a top search site.