As a small webmaster one of the things you need to be cognizant of is your competition. What other websites are competing for the same subject your site is about? And further than this you need to know what other websites are serious competitors. How easy will it be for you to get search engine traffic for a subject, a keyword or a long-tail keyword?

The normal webmaster might do some preliminary searches on google to get a sense for how many other web pages there are on a particular search term. And this is a nice way to get an initial sense of a keywords competition but it doesn't give you a sense of the real competition. There are some google commands that you can use to get a really good look at who is your serious competition and what terms will be easy to get ranking with.

The intitle command is the first command you can use. Google places a very high value on the title of a webpage. It is, after all "the title" of the page so it should be very descriptive of what the page is about. Any serious competition you have for a keyword should have the keyword or keyword phrase right in the title of the page. So you can check this by typing in the search engine: intitle:keywords . Just replace "keywords" with your keyword or string of keywords and the search engine will only return the number of pages with those keywords in the title. You will often see that a search term will return millions of web pages but when you do an in title search you get back only thousands or tens of thousands. This is a very powerful way of identifying which keywords will be easier to capture.

I recommend you start doing this will all the keywords, and keyword variations that you use. And use this tool to identify other keyword possibilities. Using this simple tool will often identify lucrative keyword phrases with very little competition. You can capitalize on these and get ranking quickly and easily.

Another good command is the inurl command. You follow the same format as the first command like this: inurl:keywords. This will return to you all of the web pages that have your keywords in the url of the web page. This is not as powerful as the intitle command but it is still very useful. The search engines consider the url of the page to be an important indicator of what is on the page. If you have two or more keywords you want to check but the order they appear is not important you can use the allinurl command. This command will return pages with all of the keywords somewhere in the url.

As a small webmaster one of the most important things you can do is identify where to spend your time. You want to get the most value for your limited time and using search engine commands is one of the best ways for you to identify keywords and keyword phrases that have high potential with low competition.

Peter is an associate editor to the website http://www.dreamconsultancy.com.au an Australian based Website Design Website development firm specializing in cheap Website Design web Application Development and Web Development Australia As well as SEO. For more distinct article feel free to visit http://www.dreamconsultancy.com.au or write editor to webmasterdream@live.com.au your comments and suggestions will be highly appreciated.