But, you know, most people still don’t understand keywords as well as they should, particularly when it comes to creating a new niche site.

Below is a short, but very sweet, video about exactly how you plan and develop a niche market product using Wordtracker.

Disclaimer: Obviously this video was created by Wordtracker and accordingly is about their product, but it really is a gem for people quite new to this area….enjoy….

Once you’ve decided to start your own online business (pretty much whatever it is, from a blog to an ecommerce site), you’ll first want to get a firm grasp on how your visitors/potential customers use the Internet. In particular, you’ll need to learn what exactly they use the Internet for.

It would certainly be great for your site if every person who logged on was doing so because they had their credit cards in hand, and were looking to buy precisely the kinds of products and services you offer.  But, of course, we live in the real world. Rather, most people use the Internet to get information. That search for information often takes the form of trying to answer questions that these individuals have been unable to find answers for elsewhere. That quest may or may not lead them to your product or service. So how do people tend to go about finding answers to their questions?  As you might guess, these days most Internet users tend to rely upon search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Whilst very few users won’t have used at least one of these three search engines, there are also hundreds of other search engines available. However, those other search engines generate far less traffic than the big three (Google alone garners well over 60% of the Internet search traffic), so we’ll focus our attention on the big ones. As you probably know, a person uses a search engine like Google by typing a word or phrase into the search box.

This specific word or phrase is the key to your  success, because the word or phrase indicates exactly what that person is looking for. Let’s say, for example, that the individual is interested in losing weight. If they type the phrase ‘weight loss’ into Google, the search results page will provide two things, “paid” and “organic” search results.  Go ahead and Google ‘weight loss.’

Notice the yellow box at the top of the page, and the narrow column that runs down the right side of the page. These are paid search results which companies have paid Google to have their text (and links to their company websites) displayed whenever someone searches on the term ‘weight loss’.  Not surprisingly, you can see that these companies appear to be selling weight loss and diet products and services.

The majority of the page displays the so-called “organic” search results. This means that the Google search engine determined these web pages to be most naturally (or “organically’”) related to the phrase ‘weight loss’. The phrase ‘weight loss’ is what we refer to as a “keyword term”.

You can see the importance of the keyword term by the fact that the phrase ‘weight loss’ is highlighted throughout both the organic search results and the paid search results. In order to maximize your business opportunities, you’ll need to research and identify the terms and phrases that potential customers will use when they look for the kinds of products and services you’re selling.

After identifying those keywords, you could certainly launch a paid advertising campaign, with Google AdWords or one of the other paid ad services. This would be an easy way of driving lots of relevant traffic to your website, right?  Unfortunately, because of the level of competition for the attention of prospective customers, it’s very easy for beginner advertisers (and even some advertisers with more experience) to end up spending a lot of money but have very little to show for it.

New websites may well choose to do paid advertising until they are more firmly established, and instead focus on getting the best organic search results placement for their website.  This can take longer but it’s safer to start with and, ultimately, organic search gives you the bedrock to build upon – most people who really understand the Internet will tell you that building solid, quality content over time is the way to the top of the search engine rankings. You can do this by using keyword research skills and optimizing your website accordingly.

To do this, you really need to “get” the search engines. Remember, we’re talking business, here: you don’t need to be a rocket scientist (mostly), but you do need to understand it and get it right.  Don’t go in blind. In our opinion, the ‘king’ of keyword tools is here.  They have a wide range of tools and a high proportion of professionals in the business of keywords rely on this tool every day.

What’s a targeted visitor?

You begin an online business in order to make money, right?  Well, some reading this may be more interested in a hobby, or another purpose blogging, perhaps.  But if it’s business you’re interested in, it’s probably apparent you’ll have a greater chance of making more money from individuals who are interested in the kinds of products and services you sell. Let’s use the example that you run a website that promotes a product which helps people lose weight.

So, the types of people you want to find and visit your website are those who are interested in becoming thinner.  Conversely, if a visitor to your website isn’t particularly interested in losing weight (but is instead searching the Internet because they’re interested in video games or gardening), then it is unlikely that they’re going to convert into a paying customer.  Or, perhaps, they’re looking for reasons why people lose weight (e.g., illness, etc).

Subtle differences make a big difference. This is the concept of a “targeted visitor”: a person who is already “in” your website’s topic before they find your website and see the products and services you offer. It’s not hard to see why the most successful web business are those who get traffic comprised of individuals who are already interested in the products or services offered by that business.

It’s essential to your success that you build you individual website pages to contain and focus on the individual keywords that relate to your products and services. In addition, it’s likely that your appearances on a given search results page won’t be limited just to pages on your own website.  The search engine is likely to find and list many external resources, too.  These will include marketing-type materials that you may publish through other websites. Go ahead and type a generic search term or phrase into your favorite search engine.  Chances are that near the top of the natural search results there will be links to external aggregations sites like YouTube and EzineArticles.  This is something that you want to emulate as well.

So, in order to make sure you’re driving the greatest number of targeted visitors to your website as possible, you first need to create a site in which each web page is focused on the particular keyword terms and phrases that you’ll identify.  Second, you’ll support this by creating promotional materials (again, using the relevant keyword terms and phrases), and making sure these are properly distributed on the Internet. Finally, once your website is live, make sure to submit your web address directly to the major search engines.  Each search engine has a page that permits you to do this:

• Google’s is here.
• Yahoo’s is here.
• Microsoft’s is here.

The search engines would eventually find your pages, of course, but using these quick submission forms helps the process move forward more quickly.  Next time we’ll be digging into the detail of Keyword Reasearch.

While it is certainly the case that blogging can be very fun, don’t forget to do your keyword research. Keywords are part of the fuel that powers your traffic.

Even though you can blog about whatever is on your mind as long as it relates to your niche topic, you do need to do some keyword research. This will not take much time once you get the hang of it — and doing so can definitely help you rank more highly in the search engines for each blog post you write!

You’ll want to do some preliminary keyword research before you set up the structure of your blog. This can help you with choosing a domain name and selecting a focus for your blog. Keep in mind that you have a few different options when it comes to your domain name.

Some people choose to purchase a keyword focused domain in hopes that it will help them rank more highly. Other people want their blog to be branded and will choose a unique name for their blog. The choice is truly yours, depending on whether you want the focus to be on SEO or branding.

You will also want to do some keyword research before writing your blog posts. For instance, if you’re going to blog about a certain product related to your niche, you can do some keyword research to determine which keyword related to that product is searched the most. Then, you can include the keyword in your title and have it sprinkled throughout your article. Make sure to include the keyword naturally and not just stuff it in!

You can also insert these keywords as tags with each post you publish. These tags can be picked up by the search engines to help establish relevancy and help you rank more highly for your desired terms.

Keyword research is also important if you’re going to be using a plug-in such as the All-in-One plugin or Platinum SEO plugin. These will automatically search engine optimize each post, and your entire blog, at setup for you. These plugins include places to enter your keywords, a title, and a description.

There are many different ways you can do this keyword research. There are free tools like the Google keyword research tool at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This tool will give you an idea of how many people search for each related keyword globally and locally. Be sure to select “exact match” from the drop down menu to determine the true figures. There are also paid tools, such as Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder, that can help you dig down and determine information such as competition levels and more.

Choosing the right keywords can mean the difference between hoping people are able to find your blog and your posts, and knowing that they definitely will because you rank so highly in the search engines. Take the time to do some keyword research before establishing your blog, and before you write each post, and you should start to see some great results!

2. What good is having a web site if it is not being seen?
90% of Internet buyers are turning to search engines to find the products they want. Google alone conducts over 150 million searches a day. In fact, recent studies show that purchasers are about 12 times more likely to buy your products or services after finding your site through a search engine than all other traditional advertising methods combined (including trade shows, print ads, direct mail, radio, and even television)… at a fraction of the cost! Why? Simply put, when a consumer finds you through a search engine they are ready to buy. With traditional forms of media, you are broadcasting a message hoping to reach the right consumer at the right time.

As searchers generally only explore the first two pages in the search results, achieving high rankings on the search engines will make an enormous difference in the amount of visitor traffic your site receives.

3. Why doesn’t my web site rank very well in the search engines?
Having your web site rank high in the search engines is a science and the rules for search engine optimisation (SEO) are always changing.

Here are some reasons why you may be having poor ranking:

Incorrect usage of the TITLE tag or no TITLE tag content.
Too many occurrences of the same word in a page (spamming).
Missing H1 and H2 heading tag content.
Missing ALT tag content in your graphic links.
No meaningful content in the first 250 characters on each page.
Less than 200 words per page.
Very few pages on your website.
No links from other web sites to your web site (link popularity).

4. How does the Search Engine find websites?
There are two ways a search engine can find a website to add to its database. The first and most direct method is to accept submissions from web site designers and optimisers. Most search engines have a “submit your URL” section inviting submissions from Internet users.

The second, and least obvious method of finding websites is to send a “spider” to follow each and every link on, off, and through a website. New URLs encountered by the spider will be added to the database. In this way, some search engines will grow very rapidly.

5. How long does it take for SEO results to kick in?
The amount of time required to see results of search engine optimisation work range anywhere from 2 weeks to a few months. This is dependent on how often search engines update their index and subsequently re-rank sites. The Google Dance for example is almost a spectator sport among the SEO community.

6. What is my site ranking dependent on?
Site ranking tends to be “cumulative” and is dependent on the following factors:

The specific keyword phrases (search terms) that have been targeted
The overall competitiveness of your industry – how many players are there
Whether you are targeting a regional, national, or international market
How well ranking is monitored and the site tweaked over time for SEO improvement
The progress of your inbound linking campaign
Number of competitor sites achieving new ranking themselves.

7. Why might I need to have extra elements added to my website?
A search engine spider is an automated program that electronically probes every URL submitted to its database. As the spider is a computer program, it is designed to look for and rank very specific items on each page it probes. If those elements are present, the spider computes a higher ranking than it would if those elements were not present.

8. If these elements are so important, why didn’t they get added when my site was originally designed?
Most website designers haven’t learned the importance of search engine friendly design. In almost every case we’ve encountered, the site designer is a highly skilled and creative person whose job is to put your ideas on the web. More often than not, the designers have not received any training in search engine optimisation and don’t think about it while pursuing a cool looking design.

Search engines are also constantly changing their ranking criteria. They do this to prevent gross manipulation of their search tools. Often, website designers are not fully up to date with changes at search engines.

9. Does every page of my website really need to be optimised?
In a word – yes. Every page of a website can be a potential entry point or ‘landing page’ for visitors. You can’t predict which page or pages will be ranked the best for specific keywords. As such, each page must be individually optimised too for optimal ranking. Collectively, all pages of your web site reinforce the common “theme” of the site, which also can help boost ranking. Don’t assume that your home page is the only important page on your site.

10. Isn’t This Something We Can Do Ourselves?
Large amounts of time, attention and expertise are needed to achieve the desired results in such a constantly changing niche industry. The expense of adding personnel and necessary resources alone would quickly outweigh the cost of hiring our company, which is why outsourcing SEO is by far the most popular method. Remember, an SEO company has already established strong, ongoing relationships with all the top search engines, and has experienced professionals who are constantly researching the changes and trends in this dynamic field.

11. Can you guarantee a number #1 position in the search engines?
Nobody can guarantee a number #1 position or specific ranking for your site for a given keyword phrase in the organic search engine results. There are simply too many factors beyond anyone’s control – the search engines changing their ranking algorithms, efforts made by competitors, and new sites being added to the Web.

Obtaining a specific ranking is analogous to managing a portfolio. Your financial advisor will do their best to monitor the stock market and other indicators and to make sure your portfolio is managed to the best of their abilities. However, your advisor cannot guarantee that your portfolio will be at a specific value or even that the amount will be up at all by a given date.

12. It’s been several months and my website finally shows up in Google but it’s ranked in the hundreds. Why is that?
It’s not always easy to get better search engine rankings. In fact, search engine optimisation is part science and part art. Search engines continually change their algorithms and tweak their rules for ranking. It is possible that Google does not fully read your page due to structural issues, your web site (or at least individual web pages) could be lacking in meaningful content, no significant web sites link to you, your web site is too small to be of any value to people searching for your topic, or any other range of problems.

Search engines may be flooded with web sites on a given topic, making it more difficult to achieve higher rankings. As such, a good search engine optimiser will look for a niche to exploit. For example, consider whether your web site has greater appeal to a local, national, or international region.

13. My web site did not get accepted last time I submitted to the search engines… why?
Search Engine listings are not guaranteed to everyone who posts a web site to the Internet. Search engines are for-profit businesses and have the right to refuse to list any site for virtually any reason. We ensure all bases are covered and all necessary elements are present before submitting the finalised site to the search engines or directories.

14. Why Should I Choose to Outsource SEO?
To achieve a high ranking web site, you have to know exactly the most effective META tag design formula, best web copy writing techniques, keep track of current search engine ranking algorithms, know what format to submit the site in to every engine and how often to resubmit the site. You also need to know whether your site is technically compatible with search engine robots, what types of pages the engines will accept and which will be barriers to ranking, plus what sort of overall “relevancy score” your site will receive from each engine you submit to.

Not only that, but once you’re ranking highly, you have to monitor your progress and adjust your tags every now and then to ensure you stay up above your competitors on all engines for your major search phrases. These are all crucial steps to a high ranking, but very time consuming and not your core business!

15. How Do You Choose the Best Keywords?
The first step in our SEO campaign is to develop your Keyword Profile. Based on your initial input, we will use a combination of experience and software programs to generate a list of the most effective and well-searched keywords in your industry. We then work together to refine this list and compile the list of keywords and phrases that will be most beneficial to your product or services. You know your business and we know ours. We know how important it is to work together to generate the most effective Keyword Profile possible.

16. Will You Need to Access Our Web Server?
Yes, we will need access to your web server in order to upload and periodically update pages. We do our best to keep you informed every time we do an upload or make a change. It is vital that anyone else who may be making changes to your site stays current with the optimised pages we provide.

17. Do You Have to Make Changes to Our Site?
While many of the changes made to your site are done behind the scenes in the source code, it may be necessary to make certain minor changes to your site’s copy or layout. In most cases, these changes are minimal. We post all changes made to the front end of your site to our test server for your approval before we go live with the changes.

18. I found other services that do what you do much more cheaply: how do I choose?
Some companies take advantage of the uninitiated web site owner promising top rankings for £9.95 or something similar. Beware of such promises – if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. That £9.95 will typically buy an automated submission to 10,000 “engines” that nobody ever visits or possibly even result in a domain ban for over submitting. Once the £9.95 campaign is finished, so is your domain. There is no such thing as #1 rankings in all search engines or “it only takes 2 weeks and £9.95″.

More importantly, most of these services only include submission, not optimisation, as a part of their deal. Submitting an un-optimised site to the engines simply will not improve your rankings. If you don’t plan on optimising your site before submission then you shouldn’t bother submitting it at all.

19. What should I look for when choosing a SEO consultant?
The ideal Consultant is one that understands the dynamics of marketing, business, and technology – and employs the highest levels of integrity in their work. There are a number of unethical practices or short cuts that can be used in search engine optimisation, but the search engines themselves often times will not accept these questionable or “tricky” practices.

You should choose a company that doesn’t promote these practices to achieve short-term results for its clients. You should also expect to benefit from the research expertise, customised approached, management expertise, and on-going consultative process from a SEO firm.

20. What’s the right time for me to start a search engine marketing campaign and how long it last?
No time like the present! We usually establish 12-month campaigns. There is an enormous amount of education, research, analysis, technical programming, and testing performed in the first 3 months in particular.

21. How often will I receive search engine ranking reports?
We send out search engine ranking reports monthly to our clients.

22. How often do you resubmit my site to search engines?
If your site is search engine compatible and optimised correctly, regular resubmission to engines is generally unnecessary although we find that monthly submissions to some search engines assists in maintaining rankings. Our ranking reports and maintenance checks keep track of your site every four weeks. If your site is already ranking highly, there is no need to resubmit it. However if any engines have lowered or dropped your site altogether (as can happen from time to time), it will be resubmitted to those engines.

If an engine has dropped your rankings considerably since last report, it is time to tweak your META tags or check the optimised pages for any problems. This is included as part of your Monthly Site Ranking Management Service. Search engines will generally pick up the changes during their next edit and re-rank the site accordingly. Resubmission is usually only necessary if your site has undergone major content changes.

23. How will I know if my business increases as a result of top rankings?
There are numerous Web Analytics tools available in the market that can help you to track the effectiveness of your campaign. By the end of the first twelve months, you will get an analysis of your activity at the end of the campaign as compared to the baseline established at the beginning of the campaign.

Kath Dawson is head of the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) team at Strategy Consulting Limited. We have a wealth of experience in delivering effective SEO to a wide range of clients. Contact us today to find out how our services could improve the results of your online business.

Author: Kath Dawson
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Guest blogger

Your favorite thing about having a blog may soon be this – they naturally attract search engine traffic. Blogs already have optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the other main pages. They also have the inherent potential to be well-linked.

Primarily a site should be designed for the user, with search engines in mind. Google tends to talk out both sides of their mouth when they say, “Don’t do anything special for the engines”. Yet, they create a webmaster tool center where you can submit a sitemap, and get information about how the engines see your site, errors and what key phrases your site ranks for. That gives new site owners a little bit of confusion.

I like sites that are easy to navigate, pleasing to the eye and that help sell whatever it is you need to. Pages should be set up as landing pages. The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry. This way you can give the visitor everything they need to make a purchase or fill out a form. At the same time you can optimize these pages for the engines and use the pages for your PPC campaigns. I believe in doing sites this way. It brings the visitor a much better experience.

The perfect site is not only user friendly, but optimized for the engines. You need to target where people go to in order to provide them with the information or product they need. There is nothing worse than having people landing on a page that is optimized for a phrase but offers no information about it… It brings the user a bad experience and you a missed sale or lead. You have a choice. You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic. Once you have a page optimized, you can streamline the transition from viewing what you have to offer to facilitate a purchase. You can also provide related content and links. This, in turn, will help with you PPC because Google is now checking to see how relevant your landing pages are to the keywords you buy.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Sometimes a site’s structure (the relationships between its content) must be altered too. Because of this it is, from a client’s perspective, always better to incorporate Search Engine Optimization when a website is being developed than to try and retroactively apply it.Make a good quality site that will attract natural links to it in order to obtain any form of long term presence within the search engine results page.Make a good quality site that will attract natural links to it in order to obtain any form of long term presence within the search engine results page.

Pay-per-click, or PPC, advertising is one of the most effective methods for drawing traffic to a website or blog. At the same time, it is potentially one of the most costly methods for marketing. If done correctly, however, the return on investment (ROI) will pay off quite nicely.

A PPC advertising campaign is one that involves paying to have your blog appear among the “Sponsored Links” or the “Sponsor Results” you find on the right hand of the screen when you perform a search with a search engine such as Yahoo or Google. You accomplish this by placing a bid on certain keywords and keyword phrases. Then, every time someone enters those keywords into the search engine, your blog will be brought up in the sponsored results. Every time someone clicks on your link, you will have to pay the search engine a certain pre-determined amount.

As you can imagine, paying for a PPC campaign can be quite costly. After all, even if you are paying just five cents per click and you have 1000 clicks per day, that is $50 per day. That comes out to be $350 per week, which can eat away at your marketing budget rather quickly. Now, paying $350 per week may seem worthwhile if it is bringing you 7,000 new visitors. But, if only one or two of those people are people who are actually interested in your blog, the cost certainly isn’t worth it.

So, how exactly do you make your PPC campaign worthwhile? This is where your marketing research comes in handy. Since you now know the needs of your target audience, you can select keywords for your PPC campaign that will draw in visitors who are interested in what your blog has to offer.

Be certain to select keywords that are very specific in order to bring in the right type of traffic. For example, if you are maintaining a blog about dog training, you should not set up a PPC campaign based around the word “dog,” as this can bring in visitors who were looking for information about dog breeds, searching for dog food, trying to find instructions for building a dog house, or any other possible term associated with dogs. Rather, select keyword phrases that are more specific to dog training in order to bring in the right type of web traffic.

When searching through the various keywords you can select for your PPC campaign, you should look for phrases that are popular while still being within your budget. You should also place a bid on phrases that will allow you to be within the top 5 results. That way, they will be displayed on the first page of the search engine results and will be more likely to be seen by your target audience.

If you are looking for a quick way to boost traffic to your site and if there is room in your budget, PPC advertising is a good route to take. Otherwise, you may want to explore other methods of marketing that are not quite so costly.

For a free CD about nailed-on effective marketing, click here.

The first rule of making a free business is, open source software: The open source community has been around for as long as closed source development and open source products are comparable, if not better quality in some cases. Name a bit of software your business needs and it’s very likely that an open source version is available, in some cases making a choice to use open source software can save you thousands of dollars in licensing for single programs.

The second rule to free business on the net is: Cheap web hosting! There is simply no need to maintain or buy dedicated or virtual hosting if no one knows your website is there. Open a cheap account with a high quality service provider like godaddy and they will be very glad to quickly and painlessly upgrade your hosting as and when you need additional power, storage and bandwidth. There is simply no need to pay for a vastly overpowered service before it’s needed. A few adverts will bring in enough revenue to pay for your website hosting, making it free!

The final step to free business on the net is: Free promotion! Google the term ‘SEO’ and check our SEO blog category on the left. There is a wealth of free information available on this topic, which will teach you exactly how to configure and write your website to be search engine optimized. Custom SEO services are expensive because they usually come with guaranteed results, but these results are within your reach given enough time and understanding of the topic.

If you follow these three simple rules, you’ll get your business online for almost zero cost. Website builders and promotions agencies might try to sell your expensive packages and hosting services, but remember these basic rules and you’ll be fine.

What’s so bad about low quality traffic? Well, there is nothing inherently bad about low quality traffic if you are prepared for it, but there are a few things that it might represent:

1. Search engines don’t understand your website very well and are sending the wrong people

2. You are over extending your marketing programs. Untargeted marketing is next to useless.

3. Quality traffic might not be able to find your website as a result of the first two points!

In addition to all these, low quality traffic costs you money! Though you might expect to offset your bandwidth and hosting charges with advertising revenues, low quality surfers are unlikely to pay for themselves, leaving your high quality traffic to pick up the bill.

Low quality traffic might look good on your monthly statistics, but a low quality surfer isn’t a tenth as valuable to you as a high quality one. Retarget your advertising campaigns, cut down on low quality referrals and slim down that hit count statistic. If you can remove ten low quality surfers, and replace them with just one new high quality surfer then you’ll improve the profitability and overall popularity of your website considerably.

Firstly, you’ve got to embrace one principle which applies to all blogs, even if their main function is to act as search engine optimizers: Your blog content must be original and information rich. Search engines and normal readers’ alike share a desire for new information and experience. If we want our blogs to be widely read and popular we must please humans and computers in equal measure, so lots of rich new information in each blog is a great place to start!

If you are writing a personal blog, then don’t write about everyday experiences unless you are prepared to discuss your associated feelings in an unusually open manner. Think about what really drives great plots in TV shows: They are all about emotion! You don’t have to be cynical and calculating about your blog writing, but be aware that using the odd literary technique to generate suspense and emotion where you might feel it in your everyday life is a fantastic way to keep readers.

If you are writing for search engines, don’t forget the readers. Search engine bots are becoming increasingly advanced and are now capable of recognizing poorly written content. The penalty is that a poorly written blog with a similar number of keywords will fall well below a well written entry on search results. Keep things legible and don’t overdo those blogging keywords!

Finally: Keep it regular! There’s nothing readers and bots like more than a good regular dose of the thing they visit the site for. Regular updating will work over time to generate long term blog readers, and it’ll keep bots happy because they can figure out a schedule to visit your site and know that they will always find new content. Get out there and get blogging!