SEO Crunch

Most people when first deciding to start a web site or blog, choose something they are passionate about and have knowledge and interest in. This is a sensible thing and, depending on your goals, may well be a wise decision.

However, there are many other factors to consider, especially if making some money with your web site or blog is a goal. The reasons you should choose your niche carefully include:

• Once you begin building a body of content, it is very difficult to change or broaden the subject matter successfully.
  Some niches are highly saturated, including SEO, Webmaster Tips and Blogging, the primary topics of SEO Crunch, which I wouldn’t recommend unless you are truly determined and have the guts to stick with it for a long time before seeing any significant results. Better to choose a niche with less competition.
• Some niches pay much better than others. If your web site offers all the information in the world about mouse traps, flowers or tornados, you may well attract plenty of enthusiasts interested in your niche. But, consider the niche also from your advertisers’ point of view. If they sell something that is low cost or which is not generally purchased online, you may find that the click rates you get are quite low.
• Some niches attract more attention than others, which is related to the saturation and competition point above. If you write about a very small niche topic like ladybugs, flytraps or species of spiders, chances are you won’t see a whole lot of traffic since there will be fewer potential visitors. On the other hand, you want to find a balance between a niche that is too saturated and one that gets few visitors, so researching your niche is very important to your success.
• Some niches are more relevant to people who spend time online. Think about your target audience and do some research to determine whether or not they are among the “Web Elite” who spend more time online than watching television or other media channels. A site about retirement villas could be a great idea, but do the people interested in selecting a retirement home tend to do their research online? Hmmm …. Could be a niche worth examining closer!

Once you have selected a niche for your web site or blog, its time to begin doing keyword research. The goal of this exercise is to identify the keywords you will embed naturally and meaningfully within your site content.

The best tool we have found for such research is Trellian’s Keyword Discovery. Using this or another keyword tool allows you to find keywords that people actually query on Google and other search engines. You may think that flytrap is a great keyword, but if only 3 people enter the keyword into their search box each month, you won’t attract many users.

Now, unless you are one of the lucky few who have an aged domain, with hundreds or thousands of pages already in place and quality, related back links to match, then picking the heavy hitting keywords is also a mistake.

For example, if you are starting a blog about autos, good luck trying to get indexed and highly ranked for keywords like Car (639,182 monthly queries), Chevrolet (210,566 monthly queries) or Tires (544,795). Your competition will be fierce and the long established sites in the niche will outrank you every time.

If you are lucky to be a leader in your niche, then by all means choose the keywords that get the most queries. But, if you are like most of us trying to carve out a place in your niche, you will have much more success using so called “long tail” keywords. These are keywords that get far fewer queries and are not as likely to be saturated already by the competitors.

One general rule of thumb for a newer site trying to establish a mark within a reasonably popular niche is to select keywords that get between 1,000 and 2,000 monthly queries. Also try to select about three to five related keywords to use within each article or story you post, placing them contextually and naturally distributed throughout your article. Front load them in your page title, URL, meta description, image alt tags and excerpt as well.

In future articles we will discuss some of these techniques in more detail, but this hopefully provides you with the basics you need to more wisely choose a niche and keywords to use as you build your site content!