DAVID BYRDEN
I begin to monitor my website's position in search engines; this is called its “rank”. There are many tools for this, such as Rank Checker, but I don't give much weight to what they discover. If a site isn't listed on the first page of search results, in the first few items, most users won't bother to see it. Whether I am at 50 or 500 makes very little difference; I want to be at 5. But the tools do reveal that the search engines are aware of my site.
Now, I write new text for my homepage. I put my keywords in it, being careful not to overuse them. In the early days of the Web it was possible to mindlessly repeat a keyword and deceive the search engines into thinking that you were very relevant; nowadays they are much smarter and won't list nonsensical pages.