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Niche Marketing - Why Keyword Research Come First
A good portion of my business involves spending hours and hours using incredibly powerful but difficult to master software to uncover thousands of the exact, targeted keyword phrases people in any given niche market are typing into the search engines.
When people new to the internet discover what I do and see the huge lists of keyword phrases and search data I uncover and compile, they often ask me what the heck it is used for.
My clients and customers on the other hand, tend not to ask questions at all. They just pay me, take their lists and happily disappear into the shadows. Do they know something you do not?
It really all boils down to this - you do not have a good chance of creating and launching a successful niche website if you are lacking the keyword data about your niche market.
If you do not know what related keywords and keyword phrases potential visitors are actively searching on and if you do not know how often they are searching for these terms, you will never know exactly what it is they want, how badly they want it or how you can get that information in front of them.
Good keyword data lists for any given niche market are hard to research and expensive to come by, but are invaluable to those who put them to use. Good niche keyword lists serve many functions including:
They allow you to see the actual thoughts and desires going through the minds of those in your target market as they search online. At the very least, these list will give you hundreds of ideas for different websites, info-products, ebooks and more that you can create and profit from, knowing ahead of time that there is a demand.
They are used to launch pay-per-click campaigns to drive targeted traffic to your site. Savvy web marketers know that bidding on large numbers of targeted keywords with low bids has distinct advantages over bidding on just a few expensive top-trafficked phrases.
They are used for creating content for niche websites. For example, the keyword phrases are useful for generating article titles and topics you already know are in demand.
And of course, they can help with SEO. For those with a little more experience in search engine optimization, knowing exactly what phrases people are searching for in any niche gives them an incredible edge and much higher chance of achieving high search engine listings that lead to traffic.
If you are just throwing up websites without incorporating professional niche keyword research into your site planning, content development and search engine optimization, you are truly taking a shot in the dark.
And if you are not able to afford the expensive software and time it takes to learn how to use it to do the research yourself, there are always others who offer their research for your use.
James B. Allen is a niche marketing consultant who provides private research for a small, exclusive client list of internet marketers, website designers and SEO professionals. Download a free sample of his market research at: http://www.NicheGuild.com
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No one outside of the companies that run these search engines knows what it is exactly that makes search engines rank sites high. Especially due to the fact that these search engines and the rigorous ranking filters they use to spit out search results change almost monthly. Even a former Google employee doesn't know how to guarantee rankings! If someone is telling you they'll guarantee top rankings, run fast! Those are some shady, shady claims. Google themselves have said:"No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google - Beware of SEO's that claim to guarantee rankings, or that claim a "special relationship" with Google, or that claim to have a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is by using the page at http:// www.google.com/addurl.html. You can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever." - http:// www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/seo.htmlAn ethical SEO company will not guarantee rankings. They will guarantee that their methods follow search engine guidelines, and they will guarantee customer satisfaction, but at no point in time will any SEO company with a conscience guarantee your rankings."Your site needs to be continually resubmitted to get on and stay on the search engines" When will I see the end of this one? How old is this method now? 5 years? 10 years? We're talking about the days when Webcrawler was the biggest search engine and all computers were beige! This claim is so fully untrue, had Pinocchio uttered it, his nose would have stretched from Rome to Poughkeepsie. And the good folks at Google will once again back me up on this one:"Submission is not necessary and does not guarantee inclusion in our index. Given the large number of sites submitting URLs, it's likely your pages will be found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through the URL submission form. We DO NOT add all submitted URLs to our index, and cannot predict when or if they will appear." - http:// www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/1.html#A2"Meta tags are not important anymore"Sure they aren't. If you don't want a decent ranking on MSN. The new MSN search places a lot of value on the keywords and description meta tags. Without these tags in your site's code, your ranking on MSN will suffer. Just as importantly, if your keywords and description meta tags don't use proper language, your rankings will suffer. The description tag is also what MSN uses as the visible description for a site in the search results. And of course, to prove I'm not the one blowing hot air, here is what MSN themselves say about it:"Site descriptions are extracted from the content of your page each time MSNBot crawls your site and indexes its pages... ...the best way to affect your site description is to ensure that your web pages effectively deliver the information you want to see in search results." - Click here to see the page this is found on. "Your Web Site Has Been Sabotaged" This one is truly unreal. I can't believe it's even been used as an excuse for why an SEO company hasn't achieved decent rankings for you. But alas, more than one SEO company has told potential clients of ours that the reason they are not ranking well, or why their search engine optimization campaign is not effective, is because someone else has been sabotaging the site. Some of the clients who have been told this are small businesses, like bed and breakfasts or pet sitters. We always explain to these potential clients that the likelihood of someone even having the initial idea to sabotage a web site, the site in question would have to be a fairly large one, and the target of a lot of hatred. Why? Because sabotaging a web site's rankings takes a massive amount of time and energy. We're talking months, maybe even years of hard, hard work. Why would anyone devote months or years of their life to taking down a pet sitting site? Or a bed and breakfast?Once again, these are some hefty claims and it is a clear sign that the company who is running your SEO campaign is unwilling to be held accountable for their actions or lack thereof.Don't Put Up With It. The bottom line is, your search engine optimization company works for you. You are paying them. Hold them accountable as you would any other vendor. 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