the Art of Zen

Your Competition and You – Where’s the Gold?
So you have your search terms and are ready to dump them into your site and let the search engines find you, see how great your search terms are, and list you at the top of your favorite results pages. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. First you need to narrow your market a little. You see, the Internet is so large now, and there are so many factors involved in search engine placement (i.e. how your search terms are placed, frequency, age of URL, frequency of site updates, content, etc.), that just throwing the most popular terms on your page is not going to get you a high rank. So you need to create a niche in your market; before you try to tackle the world.

How do you do this? You do this by using your browser and putting in each term or phrase into Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Log the results for each of your new terms (i.e. Widget: Google=37,000,000 / Yahoo!=28,700,000 / MSN=984,507). Now look at the amount of searches against the amount of your competition. For example: You have 3,950 searches a month for Gold Widgets, and your competition for that term is 15,400,000. You also have 984 searches for Golden Widgets, but the competition is only at 1,052,000. You’d have a better chance at ranking high on the term Golden Widgets then Gold Widgets, and getting a front page ranking under Golden Widgets, will get better results than a page 10 ranking under Gold Widgets.

So going for the biggest number in search results is not always the wisest decision you could make. Focusing on smaller numbers can yield higher results even on lower searched terms. Another option is to down scale your market. Focus on search terms that include your state, county, or even city name. This will reduce the searches considerably over a broad term, but it will increase your position within the term. Granted, if nobody is searching for ‘Boise Golden Widgets’, then you could be in the #1 position and get no hits at all. So use common sense when selecting your niche markets and make sure you are getting some kind of decent search results on a term before putting the time and effort into optimizing your site for it.

Once you have your terms, you need to place them into your site. Part 3 of this set will cover the foundation of placement for your search terms.