Moe was talking to Larry about his website but was dismayed… I don’t know Larry, I got the hosting, got a good price too, only $1 per year, went on-line and they let me build my own site with great picture at the top, I can change the colors and it even has a flash movie. They got this really cool feature where you can say click here to skip this intro, all kinds of add-ons for advertising. I can also put all kinds of ads on it so I can start making some real money. Larry asks, “so what’s the problem Moe?”. Moe responds, well Curly said he tried to find my site on Google, but my site didn’t come up.

You should treat your on-line business like any other business giving it the same care. Getting cheap, cutting corners shows in more ways than one, but the major downside is your potential customer may see this downfall and wonder… why should I do business here?

Let’s assume Moe was able to hack his template and get it optimized with the right structure, all the keywords in the right places, was able to generate some pretty good content, and made some friendly URLs. So what could be the problem? In a perfect world this should do the trick, Right?

The problem is, Moe picked some highly competitive keywords. You can get some background in the article Keyword Research, You Ask Why?

As it turns out, Moe’s keywords were also targeted by major companies that were also well optimized, had thousands of pages indexed, well over 100,000 backlinks to their domain and pages, and a page rank of 6 and above. Not to mention they were in the top 20 slots in the result pages.

Poor Moe’s chances of ever seeing the first page of the search result pages was slim and none.

Like Moe, most folks see optimization as having some on-page optimization components like the Title Tag, fancy URLs, Meta Tags and so on. Remember you also need an AdWords program too… (Oh Boy…)

What rarely happens are some of the meaty things such as, keyword analysis, commercial value tests, and keyword competition to targeted phrase analysis, to name a few.

If Moe  had done a proper keyword research regiment, he would have seen the keywords he had chosen were highly competitive and would have probably made the decision to utilize a reasonable derivative.

The important key is to get seen, so you want to choose a keyword phrase that will allow you to be seen by more people, while still giving you a chance to become visible in the top results of the search result pages.

Rather than shoot for the moon, and miss your target, you should choose a target that will give you a leg up to the next level. Remember, it’s not about being the best, but it’s about being just a bit better than the next guy.

Once you have attained the desired position, built your backlinks, get your page rank higher, then you might want to go after the next low lying fruit on the tree.

Start by picking the fruit you can reach from the ground, then decide if you want to climb the tree to get some of those higher hanging morsels. You want to focus and target the top positions, get some visitors, then move on. Everybody starts somewhere, everybody starts sometime, it might as well be here and now!

So what has to happen?

Well, you need to start with your chosen keyword phrases, not many, just that 50 thousand foot level choice to start you on the quest. The next thing that happens, you need to find out what derivations of those keyword phrases apply. Once you’ve done that, you need to check what portion of those keywords actually has an acceptable level of traffic. It makes little sense to pick a phrase resulting in little or no traffic. Once you have this data under your belt, now check to see what the competition level is for those phrases and make your choices. Less is more here, because each phrase can be time consuming in building the off-site components to get your site ranked higher.

This is the part of the optimization process, which is usually overlooked.

I’m not downplaying on-site optimization, as “content is king” (circa 1997) and a good page structure is necessary, but you need to know the game you are playing and the lay of the land where you choose to play.

Moe figured he had to do something, so he took a good hard look at his site and product offerings and chose several 2 and 3 word high level keyword phrases. Next he had those phrases analyzed to find out if these phrases had any derivatives that also focused in on his products. After removing the derivatives that clearly missed his focus, he checked to see what kind of traffic those phrases were receiving, and what commercial value those phrases could offer.

After selecting some acceptable phrases, he checked to see if the competition for those phrases (sites having the top 10 positions for those phrases) was too daunting or maybe he had a chance to wiggle into any of those slots.

Having found a couple of phrases having an acceptable level of competition, he revisited his site and began to create some new keyword rich content focusing on his newly chosen phrases and restructured his on-line components to conform to these new phrases. You can see more information on this by reading Organic Website Marketing Strategy.

So Moe made the first step to go after targets he could reach, and begin his road to success and treat his on-line venture with the respect it deserves.

If you need a consultation to see if you’re targeting the right keywords and avoid facing major competition, and get on the road to a top listing, call 603-425-2221 for a free consultation or click the link on the upper right and send us an email.

It’s time to be found and be seen!