Niche Website Content and Search Engines
Search engines want to supply searchers with want they are searching for! That is the raison d'etre of search engines. If they don't manage to supply the right content to the searcher then they have failed, and eventually the searcher will go and search using a different search engine.
You Scratch my Back.....
Because the search engines want to provide the searcher with the correct content, why not make it easy to decide whether or not your site provides the correct content!
How do you do that? By providing unique content on a very specialised topic.-- A website niche
Go to your favourite search engine and search for:
I did this in Yahoo and these are the results:
Now if you created a website about bun xx gee jump xx ing in Texas (note: xx placed so I don't appear in the search engines for that term) you would have no problem appearing in the first 20 results! --- because there are only 13 other pages anyway. Whereas a website on "bun xx gee jumping" has over 300,000 other sites.
So by concentrating on a very specific area you will have made the search engines job much easier. Not only that they will be very keen to see you, as there is nothing worse for a search engine than to offer the searcher no results- or just a few results.
This is the principle of niche websites . Choose the right niche and you will need to fight the search engine off and not resort to esoteric SEO techniques to attract them. They will just love you for it.
So Step number 1 -Decide your website niche and build good content around that niche. When building these web pages there a a few search optimisation rules you need to follow.
The less competition you have then the less importance you need to place on the web page optimisation. The more competition the more important the Web page optimization becomes.
What is a Niche Website?
Niche Websites (also called themed Websites) are sites that is clearly focused on a single product/market area/theme/market segment.
Themed or Niche- a Possible Distinction
Almost all Websites are themed. For example the theme of the Website could be about making Websites. A niche Website would be about making Websites using FrontPage or making Websites using Trellian Webpage.
Why Niche Websites?
The Internet is vast and most people looking for information or products on the Internet use search engines to find them. In order to get your site noticed on the Internet you need to get noticed on the search engines .
People search on the Internet by entering words or phrases in the search bar. These are known as keywords or keyword phrases. To get your Website noticed it needs to be on the first 3 pages of the search engine results page and preferably the first page for your website keywords.
As far as the potential visitor is concerned if he/she can't find you on the first 3 pages you don't exist ! --- no visit .
Choosing your Website niche/theme correctly will be crucial to your success on the Internet. Your choice of niche or theme will be the main factor determining the ease of achieving high website ranking . Without a high Website ranking it is not possible to attract free search engine traffic and hence free visitors.
Niche Websites- The Benefits
By making a website based around a highly focused niche you reduce considerably the number of competitors that you are competing against. This makes it easier to stand out in the search engines i.e. get a good ranking (first 3 pages).
You need to offset this by by the fact that you also reduce the number of potential visitors. However having a niche site means that that visitors to your site will generally have a greater interest in what you offer, as your product, information or service is highly targeted towards them.
If you are selling a product or service this means that your visitors are already pre-qualified to buy. Hence your conversion rate sales/visitors will be high thus requiring less visitors for the same number of sales!
Niche Website Examples
Site build-it is a Website building package which strongly encourages niche Websites. Some of the best examples of niche websites are found on the Sitebuild-it site results page .
Still not convinced on the power of a niche? then take a look at Niche Websites and Monopoly.
Niche Websites and Monopoly
Did You know that you can buy a Simpson's edition of monopoly! What's wrong with plain old monopoly? Nothing as far as I'm concerned. However which edition of monopoly would you choose for someone who was an avid Simpson's fan?
You see the makers of monopoly have taken their product and created niches out of it. Why? Well guess which one costs more? Not only can they sell the niche edition for more money ( currently 3 Times) they also they get to sell more games. Instead of a family having one monopoly game they now have several according to the taste of each of the members.
Not only can you get a Simpson's monopoly but also a Simpson's Clue (Cluedo), a Lord of the Rings monopoly etc. Can you see the power behind this idea? A single product is turned into multiple products but all based around a single central theme--- Monopoly.
---- In essence that is your model for making niche websites
You start with a broad central theme - monopoly , and split into smaller niches- Simpson's, clue, lord of the rings etc- you then build a site based around one of these i.e. a site dedicated to Simpson's monopoly. Once this site is established you then repeat the process with another niche until you have a cluster of niches all based around the theme monopoly.
Doing it this way it is easier to become successful for each small niche one ant a time than to try for the entire theme-monopoly. If you check Yahoo for the number of competing sites for each term this is what you get:
- "simpsons monopoly" - 40,700 competing sites
- "monopoly"- 7,710,000 competing sites
Which one do you think is the easiest? How to Find Your Niche
There a two aspects to finding your niche. The first is to find the area were you have a particular skill, interest, knowledge or aptitude. The second is to decide if the area is too general (e.g. like fashion) and if so to find a niche within were you can operate successfully
Finding Your niche Area
First you need to research and discover the best theme or niche area that correlates with your interests, desires and abilities.
Here you need to make a list of
- Things you enjoy doing e.g. doing crosswords, writing letters etc
- Things you are good at. e.g. using computers, cooking
- Any special skills e.g. you can play piano, program a computer
- Any Topics or skills you would like to know more about. e.g. learn a language
Once you have a list of at least 10 and maximum 50 then create a list and rank the list in order of preference (i.e. prefer doing crosswords to writing letters) .
Researching Your Niche
Measure twice cut once -Old Carpenters saying
Once you have a list of possible niche areas its time to do some research to determine whether or not it stands a good chance of being successful. remember it takes as much time to build a successful website as an unsuccessful one. Lets continue by doing some research on finding your niche.
Finding Your Niche-Market Research
Once you feel you have found your niche area you need to do some basic research before you go out and start building your niche website. The research involves analysing the supply and demand for that niche/theme.
Demand and Supply Research
If you want visitors you need to match what you offer to what they want. The key to this is in basing your website and web pages around carefully chosen Keywords.
Demand and supply keyword research is simply a matter of looking to see if people are searching for and then looking at how many websites cater for that demand.
There are a number of tools available for researching keyword demand for your Website theme. The main tool is Overture keyword suggestion tool which you can access directly or via other keyword research tools like Good Keywords (recommended download). Keywords are crucial to your website.
To illustrate the process; imagine we are interested in making Websites and want to make a Website based on making Websites . Go to the Overture Website and enter making Website. Overture returns with a list of keyword based on Website making along with the number of times they were searched. (see below)
If we look at the above list we see that "making your own website" is in relatively high demand (1312). We need now to look at the supply. We now go to Google, Altavista or Yahoo it doesn't matter which as long as you are consistent and do a search on "making your own website" - with the quotes.
Now we have the supply 610.
The results are Overture 1312 and Altavista 610.Now calculate the demand supply ratio by dividing the results and multiplying by 10 as follows:
demand supply ratio=1312/610 *10=21.5
Ok what does this mean?
Basically we have good demand (1312) and low supply (610). It should not be a problem getting noticed at the search engines for this Website theme. As a contrast we will do the same, but this time the Website theme is Website design.
The results are :
Overture 214303
Altavista 1,576,064
Demand supply ratio=214303/1,576,064 *10=1.3
Here we have good demand (214303) but high supply (1,576,064). This one is probably not worth trying.
Rule of Thumb: If the ratio of demand/supply*10 >10 then we have a very good chance to get noticed for this Website theme. If it is below 5 then I personally would find something else. The higher the better. So if I were to do this analysis and one returns a ratio of 40 and the other 20 then go with the one of 40.
For those who decide to purchase the Site Build-it web package the site-build-it brainstorming tool does the above calculation and keyword research automatically.
Choosing Your Website Niche
The best Theme/niche area will have
- Strong demand -plenty of people searching
- Display plenty of opportunities for niche related keywords -lots of keyword combinations.
- Excite you - You are going to be spending a lot of time on it -enjoy it!
Caution: Do not be in a hurry to start building your website! There is nothing worse than starting a project only to find 3 months later that it's not what you want or that it is too difficult an area to compete in. Remember do the research and choose carefully.
Michael Holland has already researched 70 niche markets and presents the information in Strike it Niche as 70 easy to use blueprints to give you everything you need to get started on your own niche website.
Be Number One In Your Niche ! - superb ebook showing you how to use reports to drive a constant stream of traffic to your niche website.- Includes 2 excellent real life case studies!!! |
Submitting Your Website to Search engines
Submitting You Website to Search engines is free in most cases and isn't difficult. Most of the major search engines have a Website submitting page usually called addurl , where you can submit your Website for free.
Before submitting your Website it is a good idea to prepare a small text file with your Website details. This should include the following:
- Name of Website: http://www.build-your-Website.com
- Description of Website: Making your own Website made easy! Learn how make your own Website the easy way-
- Meta tags: making your own Website, make your own Website
- Your email address: steve-badaddress@builduWebsite.com
By doing this you can save yourself a lot of typing as each time that your submit your Website to a search engine you will be asked to enter some or all of those details. Now when submitting your Website all you need to do is to copy and paste from your text file.
In addition to saving you time it also means that you avoid typing errors when submitting and also inconsistencies between search engines. If, when submitting to a particular search engine it asks for details that you don't have in your text file just add them there and you will have them for the future.
You should also check that your site/page is search engine friendly. Here is a tool that shows how your website/page will appear to the search engine Spider.
Submitting your Website to 100s of Search Engines or How many Search Engines do I Submit my Website to ?
First of all you don't need to submit your Website to 100s of search engines, so don't go and buy software to do this. Also submitting to most major search engines is free but there are some MSN, Teoma etc that offer only over a paid submission service.
You will find many offers on the Internet for submitting to these search engines. I would generally advise you not to; at least initially. The paid search engines often take some of their results from other search engines and so you may get in their database anyway with time. For example this Website was never submitted to Yahoo or Hotbot but it turned up in Yahoo and Hotbot. So if you've got the time just submit first to major search engines and wait.
Submitting your Website to Search Engines using Submission Software
There is nothing wrong with submitting using software programs. However some Websites like Altavista have taken measures to stop auto submissions by asking you to enter a code each time you submit. What they are generally trying to avoid is mass submitting by scripts (spamming).
If you are going to use software tools to submit your Website then treat the engines with respect and don't over submit (see re-submitting below). One of the most popular tools, is probably , Submit Express .It offers free submitting to the most popular search engines just by filling out a single form. It also has some very useful free webmaster tools.
Submitting and............. the long Wait
Most people new to the web expect to submit their Website and then go to the search engine search page and search for it- hey presto- its there. No sorry-It doesn't work that way. After submitting comes waiting, and that can be weeks and even months! Expect a minimum of 2 weeks maximum of 8 weeks for Google and Alta Vista.
Re-Submitting your Website
If you have waited 8 weeks and you are still not listed or have changed the web page significantly then re-submit the web page. Avoid over submitting by not submitting more than 1 page per day to any search engine. You will usually find that once you are listed in a search engine then new pages that you submit are picked up within 1-2 weeks.
What Web Pages do I submit ?
Always start by submitting your home page, do this by submitting your Website- i.e. If your home page is http://www.build-your-website.co.uk/index.htm then you would submit:
http://www.build-your-Website.cm
and not
http://www.build-your-website.com/index.htm
and always include the www unless it can't be reached that way, If you are not sure check it by trying it in a browser. Then submit other pages you think are important.
Some search engines will spider your entire Website without you needing to submit the pages manually. I would still, at least initially, submit other important pages especially pages that contain links to other pages like a tutorials page etc. Here is the Google Website submitting form:
Are you listed in the Search Engine
You've submitted ! so how do you check if the search engine has listed your Website. You could try searching on one of your keywords .e.g.. making your own Website. If you don't find a listing it may not mean that you're not in the database but just that you haven't scored very well for those keywords.
If I wanted to check if my Website was listed in the search engine like Google. I would go the search engine search page and enter:
Website site:www.build-your-Website.co.uk
The general syntax is keyword + site: + Website name
The use of the keyword is optional
site: + Website name
will list all indexed pages
If that doesn't work (Alta vista has different syntax) then go to the advanced search page and you can do the same there. What you are essentially doing is searching for a word you know exists and on your Website only. If you get a result you are listed if you don't you're not listed yet. The screenshot below show the process:
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