I’ve posted before on choosing keywords and thought the subject of niche keywords might be of interest. Niche websites are all the buzz in the search marketing world right now but my topic deals with niche keywords especially how they apply to the industry you may be targeting. Within every industry there is the generic keyword, i.e. Trucks and the niche keyword, 72 red Ford F150 trucks. Finding niche keywords that apply to your segment of an industry is a very effective way of driving traffic with usually limited competition.

When developing your keyword list look very hard at what you bring to the market, do you offer a service that can be applied to specific model or part? Does your service fit well with a niche market within a larger industry? After answering those kinds of questions you will begin to find additional words that fit your main keywords. Again, Trucks is a good generic fit for you but you found that Ford F150 trucks was as specific as you could find for your niche so expand out and you can use F150 truck, Ford F150, f150 Pickup Truck and suddenly you have 30, 40 or maybe hundreds of niche keywords that your product or service relates to. Let’s look at my little demonstration after some very basic research using Wordtracker.

“trucks” returns an estimated 6,480 visits with 139,000,000 competing web pages.
“f150 truck” returns an estimated 57 visits with 94,000 competing web pages and the other 90+ keywords that are related return over 250 visits with competition no more than 178,000 and many in the hundreds of competing web pages. Any good SEO would tell you that getting great rankings in a market that has 178,000 competing web pages is very obtainable.

Sure if you look at just traffic you’re at 5% of the generic keyword but the point is not numbers but targeted traffic and so the 5% you are getting is probably 90% targeted as opposed to the 95% that would probably not be targeted if you were going for the generic keyword and ignoring the rest. Also the opportunity to get great results is increased significantly with your niche words so your overall investment in time would be reduced.

Niche keywords are a great way to become competitive online and should always be discussed when the subject of keywords is on the table.

If the word Google does not come up in the first three sentences of any conversation I have with clients or potential clients I immediately go play the lottery because it’s a sign from the Big Kahuna that’s it’s a lucky day. Don’t get me wrong I have somewhat of an obsession with Google not only from a work standpoint but also from a personal standpoint. I love to see sites we work on ranked well in Google and I love to mess with anything new Google puts out. HOWEVER, during those conversations and at times during any optimization campaign, I must take a quick breath and remind myself and others that Google is not the be all end all in search. The fact is if you are not paying attention to what your site is doing in Yahoo, MSN and several other engines you are missing out on significant traffic. Let’s look at a case in point.

I recently optimized a site for a good friend of mine. He has a business that operates on a local level only and the only competition he has for his main keywords is Yellow Pages of which he not only advertises through but because he bought their advertising they gave him a website for free. (Note: TANSTAF - there ain’t no such thing as free) Sorry I digress. His site is brand new and as part of our agreement I’m not doing all the grunt work so the content is limited but growing and the links are few but growing and with that in mind he’s not ranking in Google yet for his main keywords, in fact he’s still fairly distant in Yahoo for his main keywords but in MSN he has achieved top rankings on numerous keywords. So should he be upset with the results so far?
Let’s see:
Before he ranked in MSN -

• Traffic was about 2 visits a day
• No emails being generated from website
• Phone calls were about 2 or 3 a week

Since he ranked on MSN -

• Traffic is about 25 visits a day
• 1 or 2 emails a week from website
• 4 or more phone calls a week

Let me clarify this is not all due to MSN as the site receives traffic from several secondary directories, local directories, etc but there is a definite connection to at least 70% of the traffic and at least 50% of the phone calls and emails. He told me the other day he had compared his business to date to last year and it was up about 80% and this is his slow season.

The point here is obvious while Google is king and probably will be for a while, concentrating all of your efforts to rank well on Google at the expense of the rest of the engines is a big mistake.

All too often when speaking with potential clients the subject of guaranteed rankings is raised. While the sales pitch is nice the reality is no one can guarantee a site can be ranked in a certain position for a certain keyword unless the ranking includes pay per click results. Sure I’ve read the sites that “guarantee” results and if you carefully read their pitch you’ll see dozens of loopholes that allow them to make the claim of guaranteed rankings. So let’s briefly put them under the microscope.

One litmus test I like to apply to any SEO company is where do they rank themselves? So taking that test and doing a search for guaranteed rankings on Google I used the top results. (Sorry, I’m not going to reveal the site, as the point of this post is not about bad mouthing a competitor) The title tag on the homepage of the first result, which should contain the keywords or phrase that the page is going after, is “Search Engine Rankings | Search Engine Ranking”. Doing a search on Google for the term Search Engine Rankings and then Search Engine Ranking pulls zero top 50 results for the top ranked site that guarantees rankings. Take that test to Yahoo and the results are the same, MSN does return front page results for the plural version and page 4 for the singular version. So if they were clients who had been told they would have guaranteed rankings for their main keywords and saw these results what do you think the reaction would be? Sure, they could probably show results on several of the secondary engines they list as part of their guarantee. Engines like All The Web or Lycos. While traffic is certainly generated from these type engines a consumer looking for SEO is expecting results on the big three and our conversations would tell you that most of them want to be front page, excuse me #1 on Google.

So the top ranked company for the term Guaranteed Rankings has nailed down a front page listing for one term on MSN and zero in the top fifty on Google and Yahoo, since I’m scoring this test I’ll give it a 30.

Another guarantee several companies use is performance based. “You only pay for top results”. Again this sounds great but let’s look at that a bit more closely. The guarantee is usually for a set number of keywords. While the number varies, 20 seems to be a frequent number that is used. So in essence if you only do pay for front page results and they are only concentrating on twenty keywords and if they perform twice as good as the example above you are still only ranking a few keywords on a couple of the main engines. Now you could probably convince yourself that 4 or 5 top 10 rankings is great but consider that a effective optimization company would be working on hundreds of keywords for your site that while most of them are not the highly competitive keywords they are also likely to be significantly less competitively allowing the site they are optimizing for to receive top rankings on probably most if not all of the main engines and the subsequent traffic from that wide of a spread. That is and always has been the true power of optimization, getting rankings on many keywords not just a few.

So if you’re set on getting a guarantee you may get lucky and have tremendous success, in fact I hope you do but whatever the results make sure you understand upfront exactly what kind of guarantee you’re getting and see what the company you’re considering working with has done for themselves… like the old saying goes “If you can’t do it for yourself how can I expect you to do it for me?”

Do you want to test us? Our main keywords are Search Engine Optimization Dallas, SEO Dallas, Search Engine Marketing Dallas, Web Design Dallas and Website Design Dallas.

Choosing keywords is one of the most important steps in the optimization process yet too many times I speak with people who only think their main keywords are important. I then like to ask them how they might search for a service or product on their own. It’s amazing to hear what terms they would use to find someone elses website but they don’t think to do the same when it comes to finding theirs.

One exercise I like to take when developing a keyword list is to look at the product or service from the viewpoint of many people who would be searching for different reasons. Like:

• Product or Service Specific Information
• Price Comparison
• Locale
• Buy Now

And so on depending on what it is I’m developing the list for. This exercise always produces variations that help me with a more rounded list which in return will bring a variety of visitors to the site and increase conversion rates.

So let’s try this briefly using Widgets as a product.
Product Information - Let’s say we want to find out the latest model of Widget available, so a term might be “latest model Widget” or if we want to know the history of Widgets the term might be “history of widgets”
Price Comparison - A simple one eh? “Compare Widget prices” or “Best Widget price” or “Price comparison Widgets”
Locale - “Widgets Dallas” or “Widgets Dallas TX” or “Widgets Texas”
Buy Now - “buy Widgets” or “online Widgets store” or “Widgets for sale”
Of course with each of these you should exhaust the possibilities but in the end you should have a very good set of “secondary” keywords that are very targeted and should translate into increased traffic and actions.

The choice between a positive or negative ROI on a marketing campaign is a no-brainer right? Maybe not if you are convinced that top rankings for your big keywords are the only way to go. The reality is and always has been, at least as long as I’ve been involved with search engine marketing (1998), that the highest ROI keywords were the ones the client never thought of or at a minimum considered secondary keywords and not worth much effort.

Search terms are used in the same thought process online as people use them when shopping in a brick and mortar store. For instance if you were a sales clerk and a customer walked into your establishment and said I’m wanting to buy a dingy flopper, that would be a pretty clear indication you were going to make a sale. However if a customer walks in and says something like, I’m interested in learning about your dingy floppers, you would also have a clear indication not of a impending sale but that a sale is possible and will require you to educate and apply your best sales tactics to turn this potential customer into a paying customer. So this same thought process should apply online. When you are trying to decide what keywords you need to target you need to add intention into the equation. While you do want exposure on your “main” keywords, serious thought and effort needs to be put into all of your keywords. The true power of search engine marketing has always been bulk. The company that is gaining visitors from hundreds or thousand of keywords is converting more than the company gaining visitors from just a few keywords and statistics bear that statement out over and over again.

So while getting top rankings is an ego boost and will generate traffic, the more important question is are those keywords earning you a return on your investment? With search engine optimization becoming the norm and with only 10 slots on the front page of search engines, it’s time to look beyond egos and concentrate on what will really take your business to the top an effective overall search marketing strategy which delivers results that affect the bottom line.

We’ve all seen those ads or received emails trying to sell you hundreds if not thousands or millions of backlinks to your site all in a matter of minutes. Well just like the emails that promise you millions of dollars if you’ll just put up a few thousand, it’s too good to be true. Link building like every other aspect of an effective search engine optimization campaign requires research, time and patience.

It’s no secret that one part of the three main search engine algorithms (Google, Yahoo & MSN) is link popularity, or who is linking to you and how relevant is that link and how much weight will it be given. So to think that by simply buying links to your site is the magic bullet is a big mis-calculation. Let’s look at what should go into an effective link building strategy.

• Anchor Text - Yes, it’s critical that you “say” the right thing in the links that point to your page. Although this is not always under your control for those links that you can generate that do allow you to determine your anchor text it’s essential that you use your keywords in the text. So just as you’ve done when optimizing your meta tags or body content, consult your keyword list and develop short, keyword rich anchor text options to use when soliciting links.
• Research - Find sites that are relevant to your site, identify a page within their site to ask for a link to your site and then contact the site owner as ask them. Ok, you’re probably going to be rejected more times than not but if you’re site offers complimentary content, if the content is original and of value, you’ll be surprised how many site owners would be willing to offer you a link as a value to their visitors. Keep in mind, sites that are more popular will have a greater impact on the value of your link than sites of less popularity.
• Offer something - A simple link from a site may not be enough for a site owner so you might offer an article that is content rich which will be of value to his site and also allow you to gain that link via a signature box or if the site owner is generous maybe even links throughout the article.
• Time - It’s going to take time to not only identify sites that fit your theme but also to communicate and gain those links. If you go the article route you’ll also need to write those articles so your timeframe has increased even more.
• Patience - Once links are obtained you’ve got to now wait for them to be recognized by the engines. MSN is fairly quick at identifying backlinks, Yahoo is usually not too far behind and Google usually takes much longer.

So the next time you pull the credit card out to buy those 1,000,000,000 backlinks, think again, the chance of those having any major effect at all is minimal and even if they do, it won’t be long before one of the engines realizes what’s up and suddenly you’re left with no backlinks.

During the course of every initial discussion about search engine optimization we have with new clients or potential clients is the subject of expectations. Usually the question is simple, when can I expect to see my site show up? The answer is a bit more complicated.

Several factors go into how a search engine will react to a site that has been properly optimized. One of the major factors, especially as it relates to Google, is how old the site is. New sites can take 6 to 9 months to show up for their main keywords in Google, why? The accepted reason in the SEO field is what’s called the Google “Sandbox”. Without getting into a discussion about the Sandbox Theory, simply put, this is a filter put in place to help prevent spamming. So what’s a site owner to do if his site won’t be in Google for 6-9 months? Well first, don’t panic! There is another little engine called Yahoo and a couple of others called MSN & Ask Jeeves that you can get in. In fact we’ve seen sites get listed and ranked in MSN in as little as 72 hours. If you could obtain significant traffic, front page rankings and sales without a significant listing in Google would you take it? Yes, I thought so.

So when can you expect your site to show up? To begin obtaining good rankings in most of the engines a new site that has been properly optimized should start “showing up” within 2-4 weeks. For established sites it should be much quicker but again all of this is dependent on numerous factors and certainly is site specific.