Once you have designed and optimised your site you need to check how it is ranking in the search engines and how much traffic you are getting to your site. Depending on how your site is doing, you may then need to change your pages slightly.

You can check your ranking manually by typing your keywords into the search engines and seeing where your site appears, or you can be more analytical and use SEO software to track your ranking over time. This software automates the process of checking your rankings and means you can check for many keywords on several different search engines at the same time.

There is also another Digital Point online tool you can use, their keyword tracker.

You should also be able to check the statistics for your website to see how many visitors it has and the search phrases they have used to find your site.

Monitoring and analysing your rankings, and the amount of traffic to your site, are very important aspects of SEO. You need to make sure what you are doing is working - but don’t expect overnight results. Over time, you should see a steady increase in your ranking for the keywords you are targeting and a resulting increase in traffic.

Also remember that your competitors are going to be working on their websites, trying to improve their search engine positions, so even if you achieve a high ranking, the SEO work doesn’t stop there. You need to continually monitor your site, build links and add content so you can maintain a top position.