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Search Engines and the Art of Niche Marketing
By Chris Brown (c) 2009 

One Page, One Subject.

Building a new website and looking for a good search engine
results ranking is getting to be a major challenge now that
most subjects you can possibly think of are covered by a variety
of pages. All the major subjects such as travel, sport, news and
sales are covered by millions of web pages. This means that
getting top search ranking is really difficult to achieve, and
hence the growth in SEO services as authors battle it out for
top spot on those all important google results pages.

Even when your subject matter is a little off the beaten track,
you've probably found you're locked in a search results battle
with all sorts of other sites and related topics. This is where
the niche window starts to open, when you see other results
coming up next to yours that are not offering quite the same
service or information that you are. There's really no need to
be in competition with these sites.

As the web develops and expands, the chances are steadily
increasing that a user searching and finding a site will find
one where the content is an exact match with their interest.
For web authors this means one thing - it's no longer sufficient
to produce one page covering multiple topics - you need to
split up your content.

Doing this is simple enough. Read through your own content and
split it up into the different topics or aspects that you cover.
Now filter these sections of the information onto different
pages, each keyworded to their own niche. Of course you should
take care to have a home page that retains the address of your
existing one, so that you don't lose that hard won place in
google's index.

The Smaller the Niche, the Higher the Rank.

Lets imagine you had a site about shopping bags. You could cover
size, strength and design of bags on different pages. This way,
someone searching for shopping bag strength can find a page
right on topic, and google will rank it very highly for relevance.

The more comprehensively a subject is covered on the web,
the smaller the niche you need to target. This provides an
opportunity to create a high ranking page even on a subject as
comprehensively covered as a pro sport, provided you're covering
information on a small enough niche. Maybe just the history of
shirt designs for a particular football team, or the length of
downhill courses at different winter Olympics locations.

Don't Contaminate Your Content.

A friend of mine built a web site to sell his rental apartment
in Cyprus. On his front page he also included a short list of
places where you can buy flights to the island. He thought that
by doing this his page might come up when people searched for
flights, but of course there's no possible chance he could rank
ahead of all the airlines and travel companies, so in practice
all he'd achieved was to reduce the relevancy of his site to the
core subject of rental apartments in Cyprus. Of course his
customers may well want flight advice and he should provide
that, but it must be on a separate page.

The point you need to remember is that however tempted you
might be, don't try to cover a second subject on the same page,
because this will reduce the relevancy of the page when someone
searches on your core content.

Let Google Do Their Job

Remember what Google's job is - to bring the best information
to the top of the results page. Of course we can spend a lot of
time trying to work out what Google's definition of 'best' is,
but you don't need to worry about that. For a niche site the
definition of best is what you and your readers think it should
be. It's up to Google to develop their rules to bring your site
to its rightful place in their search rankings, and we all know
they're constantly changing their rules to try and achieve this.
There's one simple rule that will hold firm through all the rule
variations - a site dedicated to the subject a web user searches
for will always be rated better than a site covering a wide
range of information.

You can use this knowledge to create successful new websites. A
page can cover the smallest imaginable subject niche and still
be a success, so if you have knowledge on a narrow subject, and
one that could be of interest to other people, this could be an
ideal subject for a website. Given the size of the web and the
number of users, what subject could there be that isn't of
interest to anyone?

Of course, the first test you should always do with a new web
project is to do a trial search before you write a single word,
and see how well covered the subject is already. The more
coverage a subject already has, the smaller the niche you'll
need to target.

My most successful websites have been created in response to
failed searches for quality information, times when I can't
find what I want on the web. I've then gathered the information
I want for myself, by researching around the web, libraries and
friends for bits of information, done my own trial and error
research and assembled all these results into a brand new body
of knowledge. All that's left is to write it.

Your Readers Will Help You Develop Your Site

Website content development only really starts in earnest once
you've got a new site moving up the rankings on a niche topic
and developing a readership. Make sure your contact details are
easy to find because readers tend to get in touch with additional
information and questions. This helps you build the content and
ensures you're targeting the information people want.
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Chris Brown has been producing niche web pages like
yahtzee.org.uk (http://www.yahtzee.org.uk) for nearly 10 years
and runs web building tuition sessions in Manchester, England.
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