Search Engines and the Art of Niche Marketing
By Chris Brown (c) 2009
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've probably found you're 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's 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's 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 own 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 don't 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 an opportunity to create a high ranking page
even on a subject as comprehensively covered as a pro sport,
provided you're 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.
Don't 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's no possible chance he could
rank ahead of all the airlines and travel companies, so in
practice all he'd 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, don't 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 don't need to worry about that. For a niche site
the definition of best is what you and your readers think it
should be. It's up to Google to develop their rules to bring
your site to its rightful place in their search rankings, and
we all know they're constantly changing their rules to try and
achieve this. There's 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 isn't 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'll need to target.
My most successful websites have been created in response
to failed searches for quality information, times when I
can't find what I want on the web. I've 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 body of knowledge. All that's
left is to write it.
Your Readers Will Help You Develop Your Site
Website content development only really starts in earnest
once you've 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're targeting the
information people want.
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Chris Brown has been producing niche web pages like
yahtzee.org.uk (http://www.yahtzee.org.uk) for nearly
10 years and runs web building tuition sessions in
Manchester, England.
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I hope you got some good ideas for your site from this!
Jason
my-easy-promoter.com