Here's an analogy for you. Yesterday, I was working my butt off in the gym on the cardio machines, panting wildly with sweat dripping off me and my face as red as a beet. Not the most attractive sight, but I figure, you're at the gym to work out right? I might as well "go hard" or "go home", as they say.

As I looked around me, I could see all these people simply going through the motions. There they were, minus perspiration in their shiny new lycra and expensive gym shoes, casually walking on the treadmill or lazily turning the wheels on a bike while reading a book or glued to the TV screens in front of them. Only a few seemed to be there for the actual purpose of working out. The rest seemed to be there to check out the talent or to simply keep up the appearance of fitness, while doing the bare minimum.

Huh? I don't get it. Why have these gym bimbos paid so much money for a gym membership and all the related gear if they aren't going to take full advantage of their investment?

Then it struck me - these gymbos were just like those companies who spend thousands of dollars on a shiny new website with all the bells and whistles like graphic design, blogs, shopping carts, web analytics, the lot and then fail to take advantage of it. I see it so often, regardless of company size. Web sites that could easily be bringing in loads of traffic and revenue simply wasting away because nobody can be bothered tracking visitor activity, analyzing trends or checking for search engine compatibility and usability.

These companies are simply keeping up appearances, investing heavily in Internet technology because their competitors are doing the same. But no thought has gone into the search engine compatibility of the site, how usable it is for visitors or whether it meets accessibility guidelines. They don't look at their site statistics, they don't check for broken links and they sure as heck don't investigate why their sites aren't converting traffic into customers. What a waste!

Is your web site working hard enough for you? Run it through the following 20 point fitness assessment to find out:

- Is your site fully search engine compatible? Are all your pages being indexed by the major search engines?

- Do you track your visitor statistics on a regular basis? Do you use the information provided by your visitor statistics to improve your site?

- Is your web site accessible to visually-impaired visitors? Does it meet the international standards set down by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)?

- Do you know which sites and search engines provide you with the most traffic? Do you use this information to increase your traffic further?

- Do you track the source of all reported errors in your site statistics and fix them promptly?

- Do you know which keywords your site was found for in the search engines? Have you conducted keyword research to determine what search terms your target markets are looking for so you can optimize for them?

- Does your web site HTML code validate to W3 standards? Do you check for validation regularly?

- Does your site contain zero broken links? Do you check for and fix broken links regularly?

- Has your site been fully search engine optimized to integrate your target search terms into your Page Titles, META Tags and visible page text?

- Have you created and submitted an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps?

- Have you created and submitted a sitemap to Yahoo Site Explorer?

- Have you checked to see if your site meets Google's Webmaster Guidelines?

- Do you measure your visitor sign-ups and conversions on a regular basis? Do you tweak your landing page copy to increase the conversion rates?

- Is your site navigation intuitive and are your visitors following the navigation paths you intended?

- Do you encourage feedback from your site visitors and provide an obvious way for them to provide such feedback?

- Are there at least 250 words of text on your home page to satisfy search engines?

- Does your site contain a visible, text-based site map to aid user navigation?

- Do you have an ongoing link building campaign running to secure more incoming links to your site and improve your site's link popularity score?

- Does your site have a high percentage of repeat visitors? Are the majority of your visitors staying on your site for more than a minute?

- Do your search engine referrals and site traffic figures grow each month?

Unless you can answer yes to all the questions in the above checklist, your web site is not working hard enough for you and needs a workout. Get to it!

Keyword Research Tool

This is the most important tool if you want to make your website visible in the Search Engine (SE) like Google. The fact that 91% of Internet surfer are using SE to find information they want made the Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) as the most effective way to attract targeted visitors.

Besides that, the advanced keyword research tools can also indicate the keywords' profitability as well. As a result, you can focus on developing web pages surrounding those keywords for maximum profits. And these tools cost either $97 to $176 once-off payment or $167 to $599 yearly subscription.

Domain Name

You can get the cheapest domain names at 1and1 which cost $6.99 per year. However, it is limited to certain countries only. If your country is not listed in 1and1, you can still purchase cheap domain name at GoDaddy for only $9.99 per year.

But be very careful not to search your domain availability in Network Solutions. Otherwise, your preferred domain will be locked for few days which leave you with no options but to pay $34.99 per year for that domain name.

Web Hosting

For unlimited web space and bandwidth, you have to pay $119 per year. To have huge web space and bandwidth is important because you will need both to grow your online businesses. A part from that, you must choose hosting that offer the highest server uptime too so that your website is reliable.

Website Building Software

Website Builder can cost you anywhere from $97 to $766. It really depends on your needs e.g. build for Adsense income, affiliate marketing or eBay store. It is advisable that you choose one that fit your existing needs as well as other features for future business expansion. I prefer to use Site Build It since it require not HTML knowledge and fit to all monetization plans.

SE Submission Services

As mentioned before, SE plays a big role in the cyber world. To ensure that your website remain valid in the eye of SE giants like Google and Yahoo, you need to update them whenever you build new web pages. And SE submission service costs about $189 per year.

Other than submitting your website to the SEs, they will also advice you on ways to optimize your web pages for maximum SE Optimization (SEO) benefits.

SE Monitoring Tool

This tool will help you to gauge how your web pages are performing in the eye of SE. The way this tool works is that, it crawls pages that ranked top in SERP and supply you the SEO details on how it was ranked that high. This can cost you about $167.

Auto-responder

In today's situation, auto-responder is not an option anymore. If you are serious about making money online, this is the first thing you should consider to own after the website builder and keyword research tool. Despite the fact that you have to pay $179 per year for this service, the benefits will outweigh the cost incurred if you do it right.

These tools can easily cost you $661 per year on top of the $264 once-off payment. Of course it is a very expensive, but if you compare with the cost of building a successful business in the real world (offline); which takes $50,000 the least, it is so much affordable for most Infopreneurs.

But the good news is that, Site Build It is offering all the tools mentioned above for only $299 per year.

When it comes to building websites you need to understand what you fundamentally wish to achieve. This should be front and center. This way you stay focused on your overall goal which will help you stay on track when it comes to research.

One thing a lot of people fail to remember when building a site is that you will need to effectively communicate with people. Sure you will be doing a lot of keyword research but behind those keywords are people who need something and you need to communicate with them.

The mechanics of the site will be based upon the keywords you choose. This will determine the navigation and overall theme of your site. Getting this right is really important. This will also help you to achieve good rankings on the search engines.

For effective keyword research you will need to visit multiple sites to determine how best you can position your new site. Everyone will tell you that you need low competition keywords with high volume searches - while this is sound advice it can be tuff to achieve but that does not mean that you should not do it.

Where I change the game a little is by starting with the article directories and looking for keywords with articles that achieve high number of page views, this way I know I can write an article and get immediate quality traffic without having to wait for the search engines.

This can bring you advertising revenue and sales. When it comes to building the site itself there are lots of site building software out there. The one I had the most success with starting out helped me to get into the search engines and took care of hosting and good link development along with a solid site structure.

To learn how you can put this work for you select any of the following links.