After you've made all of the necessary optimizations to your website, you should check up on it from time to time. After your website has been indexed by the search engines, check to see how well it ranks for your chosen keywords. Make sure to give your website a few days (or even weeks) before the ranking is "settled". If you are not satisfied with the ranking for your specific keywords and search terms, go ahead and start thinking about making the necessary changes.

My suggestion is to be patient, and not make any drastic changes to your SEO after a new website has just been indexed for the very first time. Remember that you are also waiting for the search engines to index or re-index other websites that are now linking to yours. It takes some time to build up your SEO connections and importance. Every successful and popular website has to start somewhere, even with the most carefully planned search engine optimization.

Has your website been indexed? You can check this by going to Google, Yahoo, or Bing and typing: "site:www.yourwebsite.com" into the search field (remember to replace "www.yourwebsite.com" with your own website address). This will allow you to see several things:

• If your site has been indexed
• How many pages have been indexed
• When it was indexed last

Note: If you are interested in software that allows you to see exactly how your website is doing, analyzes and tracks it and shows you exactly what's working and what's not, my recommendation is SEO Monitor. Check out my review of it on the SEO Resources page.

Ask questions or post comments here about finding out how well your website is doing.