The first lesson: Start by doing the research

The research is crucial for understanding the niche in which one wants to achieve good search rankings. There are many tools available on the market and some of them are even free to use. In the next steps, I’m going to point you towards some of the most important free webmasters tools available up to date and I suggest you master them well.

If you are a non English speaking individual, the good news is that most of those tools are also available in major language versions. The bad thing is that if you wish to compete in the English speaking competition and are not proficient in the English language…you are in a big doo-doo. Seriously. Now, you don’t need to have a major in English literature, but at least you should be able to have a meaningful conversation in that language regarding your desired niche. Boxers and even more widely canines in our case. And be prepared to do a lot of reading in the next months to come, because there is a vast amount of knowledge out there. And stop worying about that too. The goal of this mini course is to give you a solid start without you having to master the technical stuff in detail. You just need to master the usage of those tools i'm going to provide for you, and you'll be well on your way.

And of course for you to be able to learn, you should get familiar with internet related phrases. In my experience, which is an experience of a member of a small language group (2 million people), in order to succeed in his “quest”, one must be able to obtain information from a much wider language pool than a member of an language group which for example counts in tens of millions, or as it is the case with English, in hundreds of millions. But in the end, the lingua franca in the internet world is English. Tough luck for all the “self sufficient” language groups which do not put emphasis on learning any other language but their own. They can maybee even “rule” the web in their language, but compared to the rest of the world, they are swimming in a much smaller pond, so their reach is limited.

Ok, the first set of tools is available at Google. You have probably seen the logo for Firefox with Google toolbar. You need that one.

Now, why the Mozilla Firefox?

Well, because when creating a wb page, one should optimize it for at least two major browsers. One and still widely used is of course IE and the second one is Firefox. Web Pages optimized with only one browser in mind, especially if produced with a software tool, tend to look completely different in another browser. That fact is evident when one encounters a web page where one is not able to browse the pages, because the page includes some code that the browser doesn’t “understand”, because it is written “for” another browser. And when one uses that other browser, everything looks perfect, all the Java menus are functional, SPLASH is visible, etc. Mind you, that with these explanations, I’m laying out the issue discussed here in a very simplified manner so even the complete newbies could understand.

So... you need the Firefox browser to check-up your own pages in order to see if maybe you are not loosing visitors just because they can not see your page properly – they are using a browser different than Internet Explorer. After all, loosing visitors, especially those unique , first time coming visitors is not cool. Most likely they are lost forever. And if we know that Firefox is used by almost 20 percent of all internet users, you can see that the expected amount of targeted visitors using that browser is quite big and not to be overlooked. So do we want to forget about those visitors? Certainly not, I think.

 

The next reason wy one should have the Firefox with Google Toolbar installed (and be using it) is the usability of the browser. Firefox offers many different usefull web tools in form of toolbars. One of them is as mentioned, the Google toolbar. By using it you can observe your page rank, related pages (competition), incoming links, outgoing links, auto fill option for filling the online forms and much more. There are also other toolbars and I’m going to talk about them in the coming articles. Those tools are used for more specific tasks.

 

Then there is also (IMPORTANT!!!) the safety issue. Namely, I find Firefox much better in avoiding all the security dangers which lurk on every corner of the internet universe. And I’d be using it because of this quality even if all the other goodies of Firefox weren’t available. It's that safeness that atracted me to exclusevly start using just this browser.

 

So the task for you today would be to download and install Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar and play around with it a bit. Familiarize yourself with that browser and especially with the toolbar. And most importantly: definetly register yourself (!!!), so you will be able to receive the updates and usefull info about Firefox automatically. Don’t be afraid to give your true e-mail address as you won’t get spam from those guys. After all, Google vouches for for them.

After the reception of the receipt stating you are registered, I recomend you make a new special folder in your Outlook (or whatever mail client you are using) and copy the receipt there. You can also create a rule in the mail client, so that every time you receive a mail from the Firefox team, the mail is delivered into that folder. Bbasically, what I’m telling you is that you should organize things a bit, so it will be easier for you to follow up with this "webmasters mini course". Ok, get that Firefox, and see you in the next step