That would be choosing your niche. The biggest mistake that people make when trying to do SEO is that they don't bother to do research on their niche first to see what kind of demand there is for it and how much competition they have. They pretty much dive right in only to find out later that they are going against 19 million pages in that niche and only 2,000 monthly searches. Good luck trying to win this search engine war. Wake me when you've reached your 100th birthday.
Principal number one; deciding which keywords to use to optimize is the most important decision you will make when you start your web site. Select the wrong words and your site will live in the search engine never never land. And yet, so many people never get this. They want to throw up a site with the keywords “Home Business” and expect to see results. They'd have a better chance of getting a date with a super model.
You have to really get into the basement of a niche. Well, those weren't his words, but that's really what he meant. Today we call them long tail keywords. These are the keywords that are down at the end of the search chain. Now, a lot of people might immediately think, “How can that do me any good? If few people search using these keywords, how do I get traffic?” Well, we'll get to that shortly. The point is, you have absolutely no chance going against the big boys of “Home Business” or “Weight Loss” or any of the other, what I call, “main keywords.” The reason is because everybody and their grandmother is optimizing on those keywords. So to have a prayer with SEO, you have to go the other route.
Now, that isn't to say that someday you're not going to incorporate these main keywords into your SEO. You will, but you have to get in through the back door first. Then you can start pulling in traffic from some of the major keywords.
So let's say you're in the niche of “weight loss”, which is a very big one today. The first thing you need to do is go to a keyword suggestion tool and find out what some of the long tail keywords are that maybe don't have as much competition.
Here is the URL that you need to go to in order to look these keywords up.
Okay, so let's go there and look up “weight loss”
As you can see, the weight loss main keyword has over 12,000 searches a month as of this printing. That's a lot of searches. But if you go to the Google search engine and look to see how many sites come up under the keyword “weight loss” you will find that it is over 45 million sites. Think you have a shot in Hades of putting a dent in this market?
Okay, let's run down our keyword list to something that doesn't quite have as much competition.
Let's look at “weight loss spells” Hey, don't laugh. It was searched for about 63 times last month.
If you look at the number of sites that are optimized for that keyword, it's only about 22,ooo.
Now THAT is a much more manageable number.
See where we're going with this?
Good. In the next post we’ll pick it up from here.