10/10/2007

Does your web site target a particular market?

Is it geographic or demographic? Male or female, young or old? Business or consumer?

Targeting your niche market via search engines can be a very efficient and effective way of pinpointing your visitors with the most potential to buy your products and services. With a little planning, you can determine exactly who visits your site and who doesn't. How? Well, by using search terms throughout your site that are geared specifically towards your own niche markets. We're going to show you how to do it right now.

Take a minute to write down the specific markets your products and services are aimed at. Now drill down even further. Do you service only one country, State or city? Are you mainly targeting men in their twenties? Parents? Low-income earners? To give you an example, let's take a fictional florist located in Miami, Florida who specializes in wedding bouquets. Their target markets would be something like this:

• - women in their early to late twenties
• - people living in Miami and surrounding suburbs
• - brides-to-be living in Miami and surrounding suburbs
• - dating males
• - couples (especially around Valentine's Day)

There are probably more potential markets than this, but let's stop there. Ok, now that you have narrowed down your target market/s, try to get inside their heads. If you were a single parent/ frequent traveler/ retiree, what would YOU type in to the search engines to find the goods and services offered on your own site?

Start writing down these search terms as they come to mind. Using our florist example again, relevant search terms could include:  

• - flowers
• - roses
• - bouquets
• - Valentine's Day
• - wedding flowers
• - florists
• - gifts

Now start adding qualifying terms that will help define your market even more closely, ensuring the chosen terms are extremely relevant to your geographic region, or specific product / service offering. Unless our fictional Miami florist sends flowers outside the State, they wouldn't want to attract any web site visitors from outside Florida right? Perhaps not even outside Miami. Also, if somebody searches the web looking for advice on growing roses, our florist wouldn't want them visiting either, agreed? Adding qualifying terms reduces the likelihood of these visitors. For example, let's add the following terms to our original list:

• - [send] flowers [Florida]
• - [send] roses [Miami]
• - [wedding] bouquets [Miami]
• - Valentine's Day [gifts Florida]
• - [Florida] wedding flowers
• - florists [Miami]
• - [send] gifts [Miami]

See how a few selective terms narrows down the searches considerably?

Visitors that arrive at the site after typing in such specific search terms are already highly qualified to buy from the site. This increases the visitor/sale conversion rate while reducing the "click away" rate considerably.

Ok, now you know your niche markets and you've narrowed down your target search terms to reach these markets. What next? Well, now you scatter these search terms throughout your web pages, in a logical way so as not to interrupt the flow of writing. Then you replace keywords in your existing META keyword tag with your new target terms and use the most important ones within your META description and title tag too. If you're not confident enough to do this yourself, give the terms to your web designer or a SEO and ask them to do it.

Now when the search engines index your site, they'll find it more relevant for these target searches and (hopefully!) rank you highly for these new terms. The result: effective targeting of your online niche market, less "click aways" and more real customers.

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia and New Zealand, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business Web Rank, Kalena manages Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.

 

How To Achieve a Top 10 Ranking On Google

There is no secret except knowing what to do.

Like many other SEO's, I learnt the hard way. I made many website mistakes and took each lesson on board. The most important lesson is to learn from other people's mistakes. It is a lot faster and less painful than making them your self. The second is to find out what one thing makes the most impact for your ranking.  If you were only allowed to do one thing to get a high rank for your site in Google, get as many links as possible to your site.

Yes, there are many other factors involved in getting your site to a top position but this is that one thing. At this moment in time, this is the most powerful way to get a top spot in Google. It's not just enough to have links pointing to your site, but you need to have your keyword "anchor linked" to your site. Anchor linking is when you use your keyword phrase as the click-able text for a link. So, instead of saying "Click Here", you would use "(your most important keyword)" as the link text.

Your choice of primary keyword phrase is important.

A single word phrase is good to get you ranked and bring traffic to your site, but what you want is targeted traffic, with people looking specifically for your product or service. Most times when people type in a one letter keyphrase, they are in the beginning of their search.

They may type in "Shoes", but are really looking for "Running Shoes". So, if you have a top ranking for shoes, do you serve that user's needs? Maybe, but they may also be looking for dress, casual, Women's, Men's, Children's, athletic, girl's, boy's, etc. This is why when you begin to optimize your site you should focus on more targeted keyword phrases.

Suppose you sell a certain brand name of dress shoes. For this example, we'll call the famous brand XYZ. So, by getting anchor links as "XYZ Dress Shoes", you are already eliminating those users who are looking for another brand or line of shoe. Next, you need to make sure that the page that gets linked contains on the page content relevant to  "XYZ Dress Shoes". If you would link to a page without relevant content, Google would view this link as possible spam, or more appropriately, irrelevant content.

Now, once you have compiled your list of keywords, you need to see which ones are the highest value search phrases. In other words, which ones have the highest search entries per month. The best tool for this is WordTracker, and it is worth the tiny fee you need to pay to have access for one day. There are also free tools online that you can use, but WordTracker will give you the most accurate results.

Once you have run through your list of all your keywords, the obvious choice is to pick the ones with the highest amount of searches (and content relevant to your site!). The next step is to then begin the process of a link campaign. Now, I can already hear you complaining about doing a link exchange. This is only 1/3 of your campaign. The ideal method is to not only engage in a reciprocal link exchange, but to also engage in strategic linking. Strategic linking is when you get a link to your site without having to return the favour. What's the best way to do this? Write an article just like this one. If I get one website to use this article and have it point to my site, I've just created another link to my site. Pretty easy, eh?


Since you have now engaged in a linking campaign, you should expect to see results in Google in as little as 4 days, and as far as 6 months. All of this is determined by where your links are coming from, and the popularity of the site from which the link came. Next, you need to get as many links as you can pointing to your site with your popular keyword phrase anchor linked to your site.

As I mentioned before, there many other factors that will only enhance your rankings in Google, but the implementation of a link campaign is the strongest method to get your site to a top ranking!

12/07/2007

Article One - "What is SEO?"

You're the Director of a company that makes "winged flanges" but when you enter the phrase "winged flanges" in a major search engine, your Web site appears on page 30 on the results list. You have a problem: A study conducted by The Pennsylvania State University, published in 2003, found that 54 percent of users review only the first page of search results, and 19 percent stop after the second page. Clearly, poor search engine ranking is costing the company business. So, what do you do about it? You can't write to Google or Yahoo and ask them nicely to please rank your site higher for "winged flanges" searches. Search engines use complex, secret and ever-changing mathematical algorithms to rank sites. To improve a Web site's search rank, marketers can turn to search engine optimization, or SEO.

How does SEO work?

"SEO is the attempt to modify something about your Web site to improve the quality of your organic or algorithmic rankings at the big search engines," says Eric Peterson, a Jupiter Research senior analyst. Sound straight forward? Not to most website owners and business Directors. The following SEO tips should begin to clear the fog for you.

The first step to Search Engine success is to build a user-focused site. This may sound obvious, but many companies fail the test. When there is a complete overemphasis on positioning, your target audience can be let down. Just because you have a number-one position doesn't mean you'll get qualified leads, and it doesn't mean you'll close the sale. To put it in basic terms; you gain nothing from a site that ranks high on search engines but turns off visitors.

A Web site built with users in mind is likely to fare well with the software "spiders" that search engines use to index content and rank sites.

The three building blocks of such a site are:

-- Text: Use content that includes words and phrases your company's target audience is likely to type into search queries. If you're selling mobile phones, that term should be everywhere -- in page headings, navigation buttons, photo captions etc.

-- Links: A site's navigation scheme should be accessible, coherent and consistent so that spiders and humans can easily traverse it. (A big tip here is that search engine spiders do not like navigation systems built with Java. More on this in a later article.)

-- Popularity: A good site will prompt others to link to it. External links from reputable sites will enhance your Web site's ranking in search engines.

Wendy Marsden - Director, SEO Professional

 

12/07/2007

Article Two - Generic Ranking or Pay Per Click?

Generic ranking or pay per click? Is one better than the other?

Purchasing pay per click ads on search engines is usually done by bidding on a keyword phrase. These ads appear whenever users query specific keywords.  If you are the highest bidder, you will receive the highest position until someone outbids you on the keyword phrase or until your spending limit has been exhausted. The benefits of pay per click advertising can be summed up in one word; "Visibility". Jupiter Research, however has found that the average company gets about 80 percent of its commercial search engine referrals from organic or generic results and the rest from PPC ads. So while PPC ads can complement organic search results, particularly when doing seasonal promotions, they are no substitute.

In short, pay per click has it's place, but nothing can beat the credibility of a site that can rank on it's own merits. When an internet user enters a keyword phrase into the search engine, they do so because they are looking for specific information, products or services. PPC ads are ads, no matter how they are presented. Most people, up to 80 percent of people in fact, will scroll down below the paid listings because they have already decided that they don't want to be sold something. What they want is to find information and good, relevant information is what makes a site rank highly on it's own merits. So, use your PPC campaign to complement and not to replace genuine generic ranking.

Wendy Marsden - Director, SEO Professional

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