Niche Marketing Matters

Many people cling to an old fashioned notion that the web is easy and cheap. The new reality is that the web is hard and expensive.

The first goal of a website is to be found and that means building a website that is optimized for search. With Google commanding a 70% share of the search market, the only thing that really matters in search is pleasing Google.

Those beautiful flash-based websites of two years ago are now almost worthless, if you want your customers to find you with key words. Google sees a flash page as a blank page. Instead, Google wants key word rich text and lots of it.

What Google really loves is SEO copy. SEO (search engine optimization) copy needs to be written by an SEO engineer who is also a journalist. Gone are the days of the website owner writing his or her own copy —- to be competitive on the web now requires special writing skills that only a search engine could love.

Gone are the days when your brother in law could design your website over a weekend. Being found on the web today now means appearing in the first three pages of an organic search; page four almost doesn’t get opened. Your brother in law cannot help you anymore.

You now need an SEO savvy web team that understands search and can continually optimize your site for search. Be prepared. Being competitive on the web is now hard and expensive.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2010 All rights reserved.

Google is the big dog of search on the web. No other firm really counts. Here is why.

ComScore, a leading score keeper on the web, just released its tabulation of the U.S. search marketplace. According to ComScore, “In September 2009, Americans conducted 13.8 billion core searches, with Google Sites accounting for 64.9 percent search market share. In September 2009 there were over 13.8 billion searches.”

What this means to website owners is that the other search engines don’t really matter. To be found on the web, you need to build a website that is Google friendly. In the search engine optimization community, SEO experts jokingly suggest that websites need lots of “spider food” to feed the hungry search engines and to keep them coming back for more.

Spider food includes inbound links, SEO copy, proper tagging, searchable URLs, and lots of fresh, original content. Google spiders can never get enough to eat and their tastes can change. Beware of offering the same menu as last year.

Remember that only Google matters when it comes to search.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

As many of you know, I have been a big fan of article marketing as a way to position yourself as a thought leader while creating some great publicity. I softened this position about a year ago when Google started making deductions to site rank for duplicate content.

In the old days (about two years ago), an easy way to boost your website rank was to publish articles with article directory services like www.ezinearticles.com. The directory services sell your article to ezines which create multiple locations for your article. If you distributed your articles to multiple article directory services, you multiplied the impact. Your website rank would then go through the roof. Unfortunately, Google inadvertently squashed this practice in an effort to penalize site owners who steal content from other sites.

While I use other organic SEO tools such as blogging and links, article marketing is still a very viable tool. For example, I just got a report from www.ezinearticles.com for the life time views of my articles on their site (not including the sites that they sell to). This report showed that I have received over 156,000 views of my articles, which is effectively the number of “click throughs” or people who have read my articles.

In fact, I had one article called “Product Positioning Strategies” which secured 21, 516 views! Each those views included a call to action to visit my site. Many did.

If you like to write, article marketing is free and effective. Try it out.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

A good domain name should have the following elements:

1. It should be easy to spell. Avoid hyphens, double letters or funny spellings. Hyphens get confused with underscores. Double letters can cause confusion. Unusual or clever spelling gets us all in trouble.

2. Domains ending in .com are preferred but .net and .us are becoming more common. This ending suffix is called a domain extension.

3. Two word combinations are preferred. Longer combinations can be hard to remember. I regret to inform you that it seems that almost every two word URL has been taken. Three words may be the only way to go.

4. Made up words and acronyms have been the rage—think Google, Yahoo!, and Zappos. Still the cost of creating a brand for a name like this is astronomical. Interestingly enough Google gives higher rank to URLs that use searchable words. For example, www.nichemarketingmatters.com contains search friendly terms.

5. Short is always better, but good luck with that. It is not easy with .com prefixes.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

To be successful online and generate profit for your company you must have lots of customer traffic and it needs to be the right people. Yet, getting your site the right visitors is no simple task. An incredible looking website is useless if the web designer did not consider search engine optimization (SEO) when building the site or if they lacked the knowledge to successfully implement a SEO strategy.

As odd as it sounds, artistically designed websites can be totally ignored by the search engines. Worse, they are a waste of time and money. Yes, they may be beautiful, but if no one finds it, nothing is really accomplished.

So, how can your company avoid wasted effort and become a major player online? It’s a lot easier than you might think. First, contact a qualified search engine marketing firm and have them take a look at your existing web site or discuss your needs for developing a new web site. They should be able to explain all SEO techniques currently used to gain page rank for your site. This can save your company time, dispel numerous myths about search engine algorithms and help you understand how algorithms are actually used to index your website for “Search Relevancy”.

Major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN utilize algorithms to sort through millions of websites to identify the most relevant match to a user’s search query. If your company has done a good job at identifying the product features and services that you intend to market online, a SEO professional can tweak your website’s code to let the search engines know your website is in business. It’s that simple.

The hard part comes in developing an effective SEO strategy that will continue to keep your website listed at the top of the search engine results pages. This is where the proper selection of keywords, the creative use of domain names, the building of external links and the inclusion of unique content can set your company’s website apart from the rest.

There are literally hundreds of techniques that may be implemented including validating and minimizing code, renaming pages, writing quality web copy, making good use of heading tags, etc—of which the average web designer knows almost nothing about.

My recommendation: fire your brother-in-law who has been working on your website part time and hire a professional web developer who is also a SEO expert.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

Keywords are how people find you on the web. They function as the language of online search and are a must have feature on your site.

The critical question to ask is what are the keywords used by your customers and prospects when they want to find you? The process to determine these terms involves reviewing actual searches from live data bases. This helps make a good understanding of the actual keyword phrases and patterns of search used by your customers. This information helps you decide on website content creation and Pay-per-Click advertising with Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and others.

A great website is optimized by adding heavily used keywords that relate to your business. You need to be sure to integrate your top searched keywords and phrases into the content of your site. The words must be relevant and read as normal copy. Don’t get overly creative since the search engine spiders are smart and will see through a ploy to stuff keywords in your web content.

If you think your copy does not make sense when you read it, you will need to fix it. To verify the readability of your copy, have a unbiased third party verify that your copy reads well.

Keywords are great but don’t over do it.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

If the internet is the Wild West, then search engines are the gunslingers—they decide what sites will be visited or not. If the search engines don’t like your site, you just won’t get found.

If you look at the market share of the search engines, Google is by far the most dominant. The market share breakout for 2007 is as follows:

1. Google 68%
2. Yahoo 16.9%
3. Live Search (MSN) 10.1%
4. AOL 2.0%
5. Ask 1.5%

In fact, these five search engines account for 98% of the market.

A spider is the name of the software robots that crawl around the web looking for and evaluating websites. Google has two main spiders. Googelbot is the spider that records the location of the websites and the content that is found. The second spider is Freshbot which looks for updates to websites. Generally, Google spiders will visit the average site twice a month.

The reason that this is relevant is that 80% of Google users prefer organic results for a search rather than using a directory or direct entry of the URL or other means. So, the question becomes, how do you maximize your Google ranking?

Here are a few things that you can do:

- Page Tags: Every page needs to be named with the appropriate Meta tag names.
- Page Names: Every page on your site needs to be named with keywords.
- Relevance: Relevance is how closely the keywords in your copy match the keywords in a search.
- Keyword Density: The new rule of thumb is 7 keywords per 100 words of copy.
- Inbound Links: A link from a site outside of your site that directs traffic to your site.
- Relevant and Fresh Content: Daily updates are best. This explains why blogs are so effective at increasing rank.

Manage these things and your Google rank will rise.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

Google, Yahoo!, MSN, ASK, and AOL are getting smarter. Trying to fool the major search engines is getting harder to do as the major search engines continue to upgrade and refine the search algorithms to determine rank on web searches.

Most website owners rely upon the expertise of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultants to help them maximize their rank. This makes good sense because keeping up with the changes of the different algorithms is a full time job. Yet, many of the SEO firms try to trick the search engines with workarounds and gimmicks.

Sooner than later these tricks get caught by the search engines and the algorithms get changed and your rank drops. It is my argument that these SEO efforts represent wasted money and effort of everyone.

Here are a few of the tricks and gimmicks being used by SEO firms and website owners to temporarily fool the search engines:

Hidden Links and Invisible Text

– This is when website pages use white text on a white background. This messages are visible to the search engines but not to people.

Dedicated Search Engine Pages

- These special website pages are not a part of your main website. They are made solely for search engines and are not valuable to the reader.

Cloaking

- As is sounds, cloaking provides web content to web spiders that is not seen or needed by the reader.

Duplicate Website Pages

- Content is duplicated on the site but may have different file names. This is visible to the reader.

Link Spamming

- Excessive use of linking to other sites that are not relevant or of any value. This is also referred to as link farming.

Keyword Spamming

- This is the excessive use of keywords on website pages. This is also referred to as keyword stuffing.

While these techniques may work for a while, the algorithms get changed. Then you and/or your SEO firm have to go back to the drawing board. This will require more money and time.

Wouldn’t it be better to create a website with real value in the first place?

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

Pay per click is a form of advertising found on search engines, advertising networks, websites and blogs. The advertiser pays when a visitor actually clicks on an “ad” to visit the advertiser’s website. Advertisers bid on keywords or terms that they believe that their target customers use to find information on products or services.

When a searcher enters a keyword or term in a Google or other search engine that matches the advertiser’s keywords, the advertiser’s ad is displayed. These ads are called “Sponsored links” or “sponsored ads” and appear next to or above the “natural” or organic results on the search engine text listings or results. You will typically see these ads displayed to the right of the text search results.

Pay per click ads may also appear on websites. In this case, Google AdSense and Yahoo! provide ads that are relevant to the content of the page where they appear, and no search function is involved.

The major players in the pay per click industry include Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft; there also are many small players. Prices for per click can be as low at $0.01 per click. Popular search terms can cost as much as $10.00 per click.

Sophisticated buyers of pay per click advertising learn to pick multiple key words that better target their customer, but cost less. For example, “car dealers” is a common but expensive term that frequently gets bid high and may not be affordable. Yet, “Orange County California Car Dealers”, which is a much more specific term, is much more affordable. The prices for keywords are determined by an auction process and thus can change.

Pay per click is proving to be a viable and cost effective way to advertise on the web. Choose your keywords carefully.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.