Archive for May, 2010

How are you identifying your niche?

A few weeks ago, I created a simple video on Basic Keyword Research. I’d produced that article to help a Chinese friend who had decided to create a website offering Chinese travel tours. After publishing their site they realized they weren’t getting any web traffic, despite their traditional marketing efforts.

I decided to do a quick analysis on their site and realized it had been put together without any strategic planning or keyword research. Not being a direct close friend or directly associated, I didn’t have time or the desire to sit down and explain what some of the problems were.

However, making a quick 10 minute video was easy and somewhat enlightening, but still nothing more than an extremely simple introduction. I’m not the best video producer by any means and I failed to explain the basic concepts of understanding the data.

If you do a Google search for “chinese travel” and get About 140,000,000 results, that should tell you there is heavy competition for that specific keyword. If you want to get your site to show up on the front page for that search term, you have a lot of work ahead of you.

If you run the “chinese travel” search term through the Keyword Tool by Google, you find that globally there were around 49,500 searches and 33,100 locally for the month of April. My “locally” covers North America.

Finally, if you examine the search terms with the Traffic Estimator, you discover that you could expect between 14 – 23 visitors per day if you held the a position in the top 3 positions.

Without any more research efforts, this data should tell you something. It should tell you, that it’s a long climb to the top and the results are somewhat minimal in the end. You would of course piggy back on a variety of keywords along the way, but you have to ask yourself if this is the correct keyword to capture? Are there better ones?

Ideally, you want to find keyword combinations that have a lot less page results from your search and have a higher rate of traffic once you’ve made it to the front page. This is due diligence work but vital to the success of your site and it’s marketing campaigns.

I like to try and create a plan based on keyword research for whatever site I create or develop. I’ll sometimes find a heavy competitive keyword phrase and make it a long term goal, but I’ll always find long-tail keywords I can use to get the site started.

I feel there isn’t enough time in the day to do all the things I would like. Exploring Google and all they have to offer small business is something for which I do not have enough time. Even still, I would love to become well versed in their technology.

Google has implemented a Google Apps Reseller, which should be of great interest to IT solution providers and professionals around the world. I have passion for internet technologies and Google has become a vital component of successful online businesses and careers. As an IT consultant, I don’t have the luxury of using time as an excuse. I need to know Google.

I may not be a Google Authorized Reseller, but at least I’m taking advantage of Google technologies and services for my business and personal use. Google and their many webmaster tools has become a best friend for small businesses. They contribute to the open source community too, which I respect.

If you’re in consulting business or an IT professional and you’re just using Google as a search engine, you’re missing out on some of today’s most important internet technologies. GMail is awesome email software and the convenience of Google Docs puts commercial applications to shame. But, it’s the Google API that truly makes it all so powerful.

If you’re already in the IT industry and taking advantage of Google Apps for your business, you now have the opportunity to add Google Apps to your existing VAR business model. The Google Apps Reseller Program is an opportunity to strengthen relationships with existing clients and generate revenue by having Google as your partner.

I’ve been updating my pages and my webJestic.NET social wheel and haven’t had too much time for development. I am glad to say that I’ve improved my sound and video quality since I made all those Delphi for PHP videos.

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been becoming more involved with SEO services recently. So, I’d like to just share this with you. Automated SEO software is generally not worth looking at, but SEO Power Suite (aff) is an SEO audit tool that I wouldn’t want to live without.

I’ve spent the weekend updating my pages. I’ve been “live drafting” my static pages on this site, because I find it interesting to observe the spiders as they come and investigate my site. The final content is designed specifically for human readers, but I do my best to make them SEO friendly.

I’ve also set up the social network for webJestic.NET. Generally, I’m not much of a social person. I just don’t have it in me to give enough attention to the web 2.0 properties to make it worth while. Never-the-less, I’ve established my little social wheel for webJestic.NET and I do have a plan for each of the spokes.

Finally, now that I’m back in the USA, I’ve made some equipment upgrades and have the ability to produce better sound quality for my videos. However, I doubt I fix the sound on any of my previous videos.

I’ve told myself I’m not going to write about SEO in my blog posts, but perhaps I should just say I won’t be making any serious efforts to write as an authority converning SEO Services. It’s evolving and there are plenty of dedicated SEO Experts out there producing quality information about the subject.

However, from time to time I produce something I can share and with this blog post, I would like to share some basic research pages that allow you to creatively gather keyword data, for your consideration. I’ve kinda left the organization of data and the creative thought processes involved in using these tools, but I’ve squeezed the basic principle into an 11 minute video.

The quick of this data analysis is; is your keyword producing enough traffic to do something with? Are there so many existing pages in the Google search results that it’s even possible for you to obtain those keywords? Have you chosen the best possible set of keywords and their long tail counterparts to realistically make a go for it?

Basic Keyword Research Tools:

Google AdWords Traffic Estimator
Google Keyword Tool
Google

You might want to find your own keyword density tool, as the site in this video might be outdated or obsolete in the future, but the Google Tools should always be available.