Smarter SEO: How to Own ANY Niche
Smarter SEO: How to Own ANY Niche
Just ten years ago if you wanted to profit in a niche market it was typically an expensive and risky undertaking. First you had to do the research to see if the industry was big enough to support you. Then you would setup a shop of some sort, whether it was a storefront, mall kiosk, or kitchen table, run a mail order company and tons of little classified ads to bring in the business. It usually took at least six months to see if a profit was likely in your future and finding good suppliers for specialty items could be just as demanding as selling the stuff you managed to get hold of. Thanks to the Web, those days are long gone.
Today, with a little basic information and $50 you can have a nice niche thing going. Or with that same $50 and some hard won insider tips you can OWN any niche you want. That’s what we’ll focus on.
First things first, spend wisely. Setup a budget early on and find ways to stay within it. Use free tools whenever possible and when you do need to spend money on something, make sure it’s a bargain.
Okay, now for the good stuff. Let’s start with finding our keywords…
Part One: Finding Keywords:
Finding Keywords 1: We can use a free tool to do this part. Go to Google Keyword Tool and type in a common word or phrase that describes your niche (check the Use synonyms box to get the best variety of results.)
Finding Keywords 2: Now click on the “Approx Avg Search Volume” header to sort by the average monthly volume. You are going to take each of the search terms that look like good possible keywords and run a search on Google for them. But lets keep track. Take a sheet of paper (or Excel doc) and jot down the keyword, then the “Approx Avg Search Volume” and finally the number of pages returned on Google.
Finding Keywords 3: When you have that information for a good handful of keywords you want to come up with a success potential ratio for each. It’s easy. Just divide the “Approx Avg Search Volume” by the number of pages on Google. This is your success potential ratio. The higher the number; the better.
Example A: Approx Avg Search Volume (6,500) / Matching Pages on Google (100,000) = .065 is your Success Potential Ratio
Example B: Approx Avg Search Volume (9,750) / Matching Pages on Google (233,000) = .042 is your Success Potential Ratio
Example B has a lot more searches performed but with even more competition than A. Long story short, this means the keyword from Example A is likely our best bet to target.
Stay Tuned for More Information.. 
Ten Website Design Rules For High Search Engine Rankings
Ten Website Design Rules For High Search Engine Rankings
While millions of people run some sort of website, only a few – it’s estimated at only 1 to 2% – are really successful in accomplishing what they want on the Net.
The main reason for this is the lack of well defined goals and the necessary focus to achieve them. A great plan goes a long way. Part of a good plan is web design.
Successful website design lets your visitors focus on the most important part of your website: the content.
Whatever the content is, sales pages or valuable information, great website design makes your visitors feel comfortable taking notice of your content.
Because it’s your content that has to do the job, whether selling, generating leads, picking up subscribers or whatever it is that you want your visitors to do. That is your MWR, your Most Wanted Response!
Therefore, the first and most important factor of website design is to get your content indexed and listed in the search engines. No listings means no free traffic. You can still buy it, but at what cost? Better to use search engine optimized website design.
So, how do you do that? Below are 10 rules for successful website design.
1. Use a search engine optimized template. Using a great template makes your life easier because all your pages will have the same lay-out which makes adding and updating websites a breeze. Templates will save you tons of time maintaining your websites.
2. Use Meta Tags. I know, the keyword meta tag isn’t that important any more. But the Title tag IS! In fact, it’s the most important meta tag and so many websites don’t use it. Search engines use the title tag to see what your page is all about and list it in their result pages.
Also, they use your description tag as added information. It’s a great way to entice searchers to click on your webpage when they find it.
3. Use CSS. With CSS, abbreviation for Cascading Style Sheets, you can control the style and layout of multiple web pages all at once. In other words, your website layout and style design is defined in one place and one place only. Change your CSS file and your complete website will be updated.
4. Delete all the crap and focus on your content. Flash and (java) scripts are funny, but very often they don’t serve a purpose. Instead, they fill up your visitors’ computer memory and make them run slow. Dump it. Using as little code as possible is the best way to guarantee good search engine positioning.
5. Have simple and clear navigation. You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.
6. Reduce the number of images on your website. Yes, I know a picture can say more than a thousand words, but many pictures don’t. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. And, if you have an image that says more than a thousand words, make sure you optimize it to a minimum file size and offer a larger version as an option.
7. Use a sitemap. Site maps are a great way to take search engine robots by the hand and show them all the pages of your site and also help them understand what each page is about, which means it makes your site more search engine friendly and helps get a higher ranking.
8. Write crisp HTML that will validate. When they arrive at your site search engine robots only see a bunch of HTML codes. No fancy images, no colored text, nothing of that kind. So to make search engines understand what your website is about and show them that it deserves to have a high ranking, you need to speak to them in their own language: crisp HTML coding that will validate!
Don’t use deprecated HTML coding, make sure your website complies to w3 org web standards and make sure it is cross-browser compatible.
9. Write one page for one key-phrase and use the key-phrase as the page name. Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks. Without doubt you have researched the keywords and key-phrases you want to get listed for. Now, use them as the name of these blocks and individual pages at your website. Use synonyms inside the pages, so the search engines will get a good idea what your website is all about.
10. Keep your content limited to 500 pixels. For optimal reading convenience, a width of 500 pixels is recommended with a font size of 11 or 12 pixels. It’s the easiest way for our eyes to read the text. Use dark text on a light background.
About The Author
Article by Case Stevens
Organic SEO Top 10 Myths
Organic SEO Top 10 Myths
There are many SEO myths circulating on the Internet. These misconceptions are often crazy and while some are based on partial reality, others have spread due to the lack of being proved wrong.
Here is an example: Let’s assume you make a change to your website content. Maybe after a few days you notice that your Google ranking for a certain keyword has altered. Now, it would be natural for you to assume that your content change had led to change in ranking. However, it may not be true. Your ranking could have changed due to several reasons, and may have absolutely nothing to do with the changes made to the content.
Of course, this action of mixing up the cause and effect is a common error on the part of new SEOs. Well, if it were limited to just their work, I wouldn’t really mind it. But these guys are clueless and many a times spread their ignorance to other newbies on blogs and forums and create a ripple effect of newer myths. Here, I am making an attempt to discuss and clear the top 10 organic SEO myths:
Organic SEO Myth 1: You must submit your website URL to search engines. Once upon a time, this could have been the "in" thing. But since the past 5-6 years it has become unnecessary.
Organic SEO Myth 2: In order to get better ranking, you absolutely need a Google Sitemap. It’s partially correct. However, if you have built your site properly (ensured its crawler-friendly) you don’t require a Google Sitemap. That being said, having one won’t hurt you and you can even use other Webmaster Central tools offered by Google, but this doesn’t guarantee higher ranking.
Organic SEO Myth 3: For higher rankings, update your website regularly. Regular updating of your content pages may certainly increase the crawl rate for search engines, but not your website rankings. Only update your website content if it is necessary and not because search engines will like it any better. As a matter of fact, the highest ranked websites on Google are those that haven’t been updated in years!
Organic SEO Myth 4: PPC (pay per click) ads can help or hurt rankings. What amuses me most is that many people believe that participating in Google AdWords campaigns will hurt their organic SEO ranking, while many others believe that PPC will spike the traffic and up the ranking. All I can say is that neither of this is true!
Organic SEO Myth 5: Not following guidelines on Google will ban your website. Google’s guidelines are common sense but not mandatory. It’s advisable to read them, however just don’t do anything purely for search engines and you’ll be fine.
Organic SEO Myth 6: Buying links can lead to banning of your website. It is partially true again. Google doesn’t like to count paid links as votes for a website page. Mostly Google is unable to find out if the links are paid for, but even if it does, it won’t count the links. Google won’t ban your website in any case. A quick update – Google has made it easier to report paid links in sites that are unrelated to your site. Though the reasoning is yet unclear and best practice should tell you don’t buy links in unrelated sites to your theme.
Organic SEO Myth 7: Header tags or H1 should be used to ensure high ranking. There is no evidence to prove this. However, this is one of the most common myths. You can reach top Google positioning without H1 but they certainly don’t hurt so use H tags correctly.
Organic SEO Myth 8: Meta keywords tag need to be used on your page. The fact is that a Meta keyword tag was introduced to use keywords that are NOT on the site page already! However, this tag is ignored by Google in any case.
Organic SEO Myth 9: The SEO copy should be 250 words in length. 250 words is not really an optimal number nor is it specific for SEO rankings. Easily, 250 words allows one to write good marketing copy and can be optimized for 3-5 main key phrases. However, shorter SEO copy works just as well.
Organic SEO Myth 10: Your pages should be optimized for the long tail keywords. This is not true. Nowadays, long-tail keyword phrases are no longer effective as not many pages use them and not many people search using long tails. You can include these keywords in blogs or even an article, but that is not really optimization.
Remember don’t go spreading any SEO myths that you believe may be true. Test it yourself several times on different websites before reaching any conclusion as there are other factors involved as well.
About The Author
Seomul Davis is a SEO Services expert with SEO 1 Services a Dallas based search engine optimization company and a frequent contributor on Seo-Services-Expert.com.
