Planning your web project

In Web Project Creation Process

Initial Brainstorming for a Website Project
Like for any project the foundation to success lies in the idea and objective of what you are about to build. Even though it is not always easy to define the objective at the beginning and many things will become clearer once you are in the process of actually building a website, try to define what you want to achieve right from the start. This will help stay focused, when you start to feel overwhelmed by the available options. Are you building a website, think about who is your target audience, what you want them to take away from your website and how you want to be different from what’s already out there.

Target Niche for your Website
Selecting narrow niches is important if you are active in very competitive geographic markets such as the USA or Germany. This is so, because there are already so many website out there that have been around for some time, have lots of backlinks and have established audiences. The last thing you want to do is to select a very broad and competitive niche where you will be discouraged after a couple of weeks into the project. I have tried this on various occasions and I have always failed. Focusing on a specific angle of a subject will not only let you stand out from the crowd but it will also reduce the keywords you want to target which in turn increases your chances of ranking high in search engines and generate traffic to your content.

Target Keywords
Once you have selected a particular niche for yourself you will need to make sure you understand what keywords are driving traffic and how competitive these keywords are. A good selection of keywords will help you with the selection of a domain name and with the creation of relevant content for the site.

Competitive Analysis
The most basic approach to analyzing competition is to simply googgle the subject and see what kind of websites are in the top 20. Are there any smaller sites ranking well or are there only large websites with single pages ranking, then you may have a good chance of success. If you find lots of authority websites with targeted content you may want to rethink. There are tools out there such as Market Samurai, that can help you to analyze how many backlinks and how many pages such competitive sites have in the top 10 ranks.