Keyword Selection, SEO and Your Niche Market
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Keyword selection, when done right will bring a stampede of traffic to your post like shoppers at a Black Friday Sale.
We’ve discussed SEO and how important it is for your site and as you’re aware, SEO is a continuing process and one that should not be ignored.
The search engines are the main entry point at which your customers will find your site. But there are other issues you must be aware of to get the targeted customers you want.
Keyword Selection
You may have optimized your webpages and people are coming – but not many. Why? It could be your keyword selection.
Targeted keyword selection research takes time and effort, and it is an important factor to consider. When choosing keywords you should be asking yourself the following:
1. What are the exact words people are using to find the product or service I am offering?
For example: Is it refurbished tools, cheap tools, free tools, red, ugly tools – you get my meaning.
2. Are my keywords too general, or overused?
If the keywords are too general, you may receive visitors that are not buyers, just browsers. If the keywords are overused, you may be so far down in the search engine rankings that your site will never be seen.
3. Do you have your keywords or keyword phases in your “Title Tag?”
Your keyword/s in the Title Tag should be relevant to what your post relates too. If they don’t, you’ve just wasted an important keyword tool that the Search Engines utilize.
4. Meta Keywords Tag
Some people use the Meta Keywords Tag and others say the search engines no longer use them. And still others claim that it gives their competition an unfair advantage. I personally will continue to use them, because I don’t believe all the search engines ignore this tag.
Targeted keyword selection is no easy task. However, did you think of asking the people around you what keywords or phases they would use to get to one of your post? You might be surprised. It may not have been a keyword or phase that you even considered.
Popularity
Even though a keyword may be popular to the masses, you must also consider if it is targeting your niche market. Why? You may begin to get the traffic, but not the specific niche market that will buy your products. And that’s the bottom line, not so much the popularity of the word, as the quality of the traffic that your keyword selection brings.
And if your keyword selection is popular, you may find your site competing with established sites – which translates into poor positioning. Thus, you could consider other smaller niche words, and still get the ranking you seek.
Experiment
You will have to experiment with your keyword selection on your site, to work out if the keywords you’re using are giving you the results you want.
I have found testing, evaluating and re-evaluating is the name of the game of SEO. If you keep that in mind, you will begin to see the results you want.
However, once you are in the top ten of the search engines, don’t think your job is done. You must continue to monitor, because the Internet is not a static environment and people can come online that can slide your site down the line in the search engines.