Sunday, October 18, 2009

Search Engines and the Art of Niche Marketing

One Page, One Subject
Building a new website and looking for a good search engine results ranking is getting to be a major challenge now that most subjects you can possibly think of are covered by a variety of pages. All the major subjects such as travel, sport, news and sales are covered by millions of web pages. This means that getting top search ranking is really difficult to achieve, and hence the growth in SEO services as authors battle it out for top spot on those all important Google results pages.

Even when your subject matter is a little off the beaten track, you have probably found you have locked in a search results battle with all sorts of other sites and related topics. This is where the niche window starts to open, when you see other results coming up next to yours that are not offering quite the same service or information that you are. There is really no need to be in competition with these sites.

As the web develops and expands, the chances are steadily increasing that a user searching and finding a site will find one where the content is an exact match with their interest. For web authors this means one thing - it is no longer sufficient to produce one page covering multiple topics - you need to split up your content. Doing this is simple enough. Read through your content and split it up into the different topics or aspects that you cover. Now filter these sections of the information onto different pages, each keyworded to their own niche. Of course you should take care to have a home page that retains the address of your existing one, so that you do not lose that hard won place in google's index.

The Smaller the Niche, the Higher the Rank
Lets imagine you had a site about shopping bags. You could cover size, strength and design of bags on different pages. This way, someone searching for shopping bag strength can find a page right on topic, and Google will rank it very highly for relevance.

The more comprehensively a subject is covered on the web, the smaller the niche you need to target. This provides a chance to create a high ranking page even on a subject as comprehensively covered as a pro sport, provided you are covering information on a small enough niche. Maybe just the history of shirt designs for a particular football team, or the length of downhill courses at different winter Olympics locations.

Do not Contaminate Your Content
A friend of mine built a web site to sell his rental apartment in Cyprus. On his front page he also included a short list of places where you can buy flights to the island. He thought that by doing this his page might come up when people searched for flights, but of course there is no possible chance he could rank ahead of all the airlines and travel companies, so in practice all he ha3/10/09d achieved was to reduce the relevancy of his site to the core subject of rental apartments in Cyprus. Of course his customers may well want flight advice and he should provide that, but it must be on a separate page.

The point you need to remember is that however tempted you might be, do not try to cover a second subject on the same page, because this will reduce the relevancy of the page when someone searches on your core content.

Let Google Do Their Job
Remember what Google's job is - to bring the best information to the top of the results page. Of course we can spend a lot of time trying to work out what Google's definition of 'best' is, but you do not need to worry about that. For a niche site the definition of best is what you and your readers think it should be. It is up to Google to develop their rules to bring your site to its rightful place in their search rankings, and we all know they are constantly changing their rules to try and achieve this. There is one simple rule that will hold firm through all the rule variations - a site dedicated to the subject a web user searches for will always be rated better than a site covering a wide range of information. You can use this knowledge to create successful new websites. A page can cover the smallest imaginable subject niche and still be a success, so if you have knowledge on a narrow subject, and one that could be of interest to other people, this could be an ideal subject for a website. Given the size of the web and the number of users, what subject could there be that is not of interest to anyone?

Of course, the first test you should always do with a new web project is to do a trial search before you write a single word, and see how well covered the subject is already. The more coverage a subject already has, the smaller the niche you will need to target. My most successful websites have been created in response to failed searches for quality information, times when I can not find what I want on the web. I have then gathered the information I want for myself, by researching around the web, libraries and friends for bits of information, done my own trial and error research and assembled all these results into a brand new collection of knowledge. All that is left is to write it.

Your Readers Will Help You Develop Your Site
Website content development only really starts in earnest once you have got a new site moving up the rankings on a niche topic and developing a readership. Make sure your contact details are easy to find because readers tend to get in touch with additional information and questions. This helps you build the content and ensures you are targeting the information people want.

Source From SEO News

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