Your Keyword Research Is Critical

July 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment

I’ve had many enquires on how to do a web page and get it listed on the search engines. Many people get a web designer to do up a nice looking website about their company and expect their website to be listed on the search engine. After some time, they can’t find their website when they search for it, except when they search for their company’s name. What happened? Why can’t I find my website?

This is a common thing that people do when they start internet marketing. After the website is up and they have paid for the website, they don’t get the results they want. Then they keep wondering what went wrong.

The problem lies with the keywords that the person uses. In most cases, web designers will ask the person what does the person want. That person will most probably say that they want to advertise the company or firm, or the person is in this or that business.

So the website is designed with the company’s name or the industry name or the nature of the business as the primary keywords.

Photo by notsogoodphotography

But have you ask yourself whether do people search for your company’s name or industry or nature of the business on the web? Keywords are words that search engines use to index and rank your webpages. An example is, if your website is done up with keyword, Company A Ltd. the seach engine will index your webpages as Company A Ltd. So whenever someone searches for Company A Ltd., your website will be listed. Now, if search engine like Google indexed your webpage as Company A Ltd, it won’t appear if people search for your product lets say “Graphite Fishing Rods For Children”.

This is because you didn’t use “Graphite Fishing Rods For Children” as your keyword. So it is really simple. Use keywords that your customer will search in the search engine to find your product or services.

So how do I research for keywords relevant to my internet business or offline business?

You have to start with marketing 101…that is doing a SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis is an analytical method that you use to assess your Strengths, your Weaknesses, your opportunities and Threats. In other words, you need to have a good idea of what you can do and what you can’t do. Then you need to analyse your market whether it is a lucrative market or not. Finally you need to analyse your competitors.

Assessing your strengths and weaknesses is pretty straight forward. Sell what you are really good at doing and don’t do something that you are not so good at. The point here is to be focused on either one product or service first. Don’t try to be like amazon offering thousand and one products and services and lose your focus.

Analyse your online opportunities by doing keyword research. Use Google to search for your product or service that you intend to sell.You should also use keyword search tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool and Free Wordtracker.

Generally, if there are lots of searches made and many pages in the search engine result page (serp), then it may indicate that there is a big market in that particular niche. Try to find keywords that are relevant to your product or service offering that have a balance of not too big or too small niche. To big and you have to fight really hard to get ranked on 1st page of the serp. Too small and you won’t get much traffic.

Read up all your competitor’s webpages and see what are they doing. The general indication is more competitors mean bigger market. See what your competitors are doing and imitate them. Do what all the top ranking competitors are doing but don’t copy their materials. You can get ideas from them but since you are really good at what you are doing, producing your own materials is not difficult.

Brainstorm as many keywords as you can and run each keyword through the SWOT analysis to shortlist your keywords. Remember, getting the right combination of tightly related keywords in a well balanced niche market means getting good targeted traffic with minimum or medium competition. So spend most of your time looking for good keywords. I have met internet marketers who can spend up to a few weeks to search for their keywords.

Photo by Jacob Bøtter

Finding the right keywords solve almost half your problem of getting the right traffic. The design of the webpage is the least of your worries. So emphasize on your keyword research and you will strike your own goldmine.

Once you have your keywords, you can give it to your web designer and tell them you want to have a website designed with your list of keywords. For more tips on search engine optimisation, you can go to my previous articles listed the in SEO Tips category.

Give your web designer the guidelines on what to put and what not to put in your webpages and they’ll design something nice for you which is probably search engine optimised. You can find from my earlier articles under the category SEO Tips on what are the guidelines that you or the web designer can do.

You should also tell your designer how to use your keywords in the meta tags, title page and content. My earlier SEO articles touched on this.

Finally, track and monitor your webpages and see how it is doing. If you have done it correctly, then you should be moving up the ranks in your niche.

Search Engine Optimisation is a whole topic that its best you learn something about it. Armed with good basics, you can tweak and optimise your own webpages to help it move up the serp’s ranking.

Don’t depend on your web designer. They may not know much about search engine optimisation. Remember, ranking on 1st page of your niche give you free targeted traffic to your website. Traffic means potential customers!

You can learn some of the basics first, and its good enough for you to dominate long tail niches and make some money. Once you get a hang of it, you can learn advanced SEO techniques which will give you skills to fight with the big boys and that is where big money lies.

10 Simple Ways To Get Targeted Traffic

May 26, 2008 | 2 Comments

Every business whether it is a home business, a company or a multinational corporation needs targeted traffic. Without traffic, there is no way of making a sale. Targeted traffic is easier to convert to a customer. This is because these people are looking for a specific product or services that you may be able to offer. Needless to say, all the marketing tools and information that your merchant provides, regardless of how good they are, are just tools and information. You need loads of targeted traffic to visit your website to ensure that your home business prospers.

Getting internet users to visit your website is difficult and painstakingly slow if you are not doing it right. The ease of starting a home business through the internet means more intense competition for customers’ attention. With such fierce competition, how are you going to stand out? Here are 10 ways to get targeted traffic to your site.

1. Search Engine Optimised

The first thing that most people do when they want to search for something is to Google it. That is running a query in Google’s search engine. Google will then display results for your query. The person will then click on the links in the result page to try and find the information they are looking for. So, it is only logical that your website is indexed by Google and optimised for it. Being optimised will enable your website to have a high ranking in the result page. Thus, ensuring your website has high visibility to people who are searching.

2. Link Exchange

The second way is to contact other webmasters to link to your webpage. You cannot just link any webpage to yours. Relevance is the utmost importance in link exchange. Search for related websites, contact the webmaster and request politely for a link exchange. This is a win-win situation where both websites can direct traffic to each other’s site, increase exposure to more potential customers.

3. Article Writing

When you write original, quality and relevant content, you will build your credibility and visibility to your website. The author’s resource box will have a link back to your website and it is through the resource box that readers visit your website. Readers who find your articles useful will visit your website to learn more. Being a useful content, readers may copy it and distribute it, thus readers can indirectly be advertising for you.

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