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btw, i'm just about to get going with my first Internet venture and i can't believe my good luck in stumbling across this forum. with all this expert information i am beginning to think the site just may turn out to be viable. thanks.
"Ray Charles CD"
"cheap ray charles cd"
"books for 1966 mustang repair"
"repair manual for 1966 mustang"
The generic terms probably won't convert that well anyway.
thanks, but perhaps i'm missing something (understatement alert); how does it do any good to optimize for phrases no one searches for?
Not true.
Not everyone clicks on the first result shown.
Out of 225000, how many realise the poor results and rephrase? How many are competitors (or yourself) searching to view the competition and your own rankings?
Obscure phrases such as those given will convert better.
Most of these tools will show how frequently each term is searched and how many competing sites there are.
Although you will be only targeting a handful of people for each obscure phrase they will be, as gsx says, better sales leads.
The cumulative benefit of visitors who are looking specifically for what you offer is greater (more chance of referals, more chance of repeat visits....) than random visitors on your site.
Less visitors and higher sales conversion is better in the long run than more visitors and a lower sales conversion.
The example was meant to be conceptual.
Try "mustang repair manual".
Paynt's welcome post [webmasterworld.com]
Brett's 26 step post [webmasterworld.com]
Regarding higly competitive keyword. I agree with john316 about digging deeper for keywords. Often I target 3 and 4 and sometimes even 5 word phrases if they are related to my site and also have some decent searches with minimal competition. Unfortunalely, since the number of searches for these words is usually low you will need to target many of them to get some real traffic. The nice part about this approach is that by targeting say 4 word phrases you area also effectively targeting the various two and three word combinations that make up these 4 word phrases. For example: “fuzzy blue widget sale” contains “fuzzy blue widget”, “blue widget sale”, “fuzzy blue”, “blue widget”, “widget sale”.
Good luck with your new site.
Keyword selection is a little bit of thinking outside of the box and using the tools available to outwit your competitors. However, often people think they have outwitted their competitors by coming top on search engines for a particular phrase and think there are loads of sites competing. Sadly though they often get their syntaxes mixed up (sounds painful).
To give you an example someone posted recently that they were in the top 3 for a phrase out of 1.6 million pages. When you saw the keyword used, the "keyword phrase" had the word "free" in it, but the other two words were totally industry specific to his site. When you put the phrase in inverted commas, it had only 5 sites competing so to be in the top 3 should have been a no brainer.
The other thing was the results from Wordtracker and Overture. This phrase didn't register on the map, yet the guy was trying to tweak and fiddle with his content, but in reality was wasting his time.
Using tools like Overture and Wordtracker are good for providing general stats, but nothing will tell you more than the visitors to your site. Overture and Wordtracker tools give you ballparks on search terms and are usually accurate if you stripped out the actual numbers and looked at which phrases were more popular in delivering traffic to your site.
If the keywords are competitive then you have to work on your titles and descriptions to make sure that on the occasions you do blip on the screen that people do follow the link, that alone will boost your position.
As much as anything it's about knowing your industry well, and acting in the most appropriate way.
Interesting screen name? I guess the way to think is, you may be a little guy now but with a lot of time and effort you could be a big guy. Or at least a bigger guy... you know what I mean...
It's worth taking time to check out the Amazons and B&Ns of this world and see what they have done. OK, you wont get 100,000 inbound links staight away but if you have 1 page for each book or cd or whatever, and keep some kind of consistent theme (perhaps use keyword rich company name (used in titles, content etc)) so that your primary product is mentioned on every page, you can get some way there. If you've got alot of products to sell of a similar nature, build pages for them all, title and describe them all. After some months of late nights you might have a database website of thousands of "books or..".
The trick is to cover everything you've got. That way people looking for specific items in SE's might find them from your site. If you have 10,000 very specific products and perhaps 1000 people per day are looking for those specific, even obsure products, you ought to get a reasonable chunk of that traffic.
As has already been said you cant compete on terms like books but you can on terms like 'creative bridge building of the 13th century'.
Of course the hard part is creating that many pages and that much content. You would have to look to MySQL perhaps to administer a db of thousands of products.
Hope this makes sense.
z6
(and about the name, i tried for "tyro," which means beginner, but this was too short so i added my initials. if i'd noticed how close to "thyroids" i'd come i would have come up with something else. duh!)
when you are going for keyword phrases don't count on including your company name or bookstore name in the list (not yet, at least)
