Niche traffic and SEO are inseparable. One follows the other!
Cutting the hype away from SEO
If we cut away the hype away from SEO, it has one primary purpose. Delivering as much natural targeted niche traffic to your website as possible for conversion! We achieve that by being listed on the first page of the SERPS for the major search engines.
Conversion is the blog or website’s job. Conversion might be a sale, joining a mailing list, a branding exercise, providing specific information, collecting information for sales leads or passing the traffic through a clickable link to an affiliate website. It’s almost irrelevant!
In essence, SEO enables the delivery of natural niche traffic; the website converts it. The key is not the volume of niche traffic though the more the better, but that it’s specifically targeted to increase our conversion rates and ROI.
What is targeted natural niche traffic?
We define natural niche traffic as traffic a blog or website receives as the result of on-page and off-page SEO activities. It is niche traffic that you do not pay any fees for.
What does listed on the first page of SERPS mean?
Other than the obvious!, it means that we have probably:
- Carried out in depth keyword and keyphrase research.
- Got a domain name that is not brand new.
- Carried out thorough on-page SEO
- Have developed backlinks via off-page SEO
- A well constructed blog or website that is spider friendly.
- Have good targeted niche relevant content that is unique and optimized.
- Have developed links by being active on Social News websites
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Avoided any dubious or illegal black hat SEO practices.
The relationship - Web sites, Niche Traffic, SEO and Search Engines
We build websites to serve our customers with products and services. Search Engines build sites to supply their customers with services enabling them to search for, and find specific information. In the relationship, we are both suppliers and customers of the search engines
On a supplier basis, we supply niche focused information with high degrees of relevancy contained within our opimized sites and blogs. From the customer perspective we receive natural niche traffic in return.
Search Engines rank us in SERPs on the basis of how good a supplier we are in terms of adhering to their known specification or rules and the quality and relevancy of our supplied information.
Quality and relevancy are aspects we need to make judgement calls on and there is the matter of individual webmaster’s opinion.
The search engine rules or specifications are different. They evolve and change.
We have a reasonable understanding of what the current rules are, potentially might become, and measure and experiment to detect any change to increase our understanding. However, we have to acknowledge that no one but the search engines themselves have a complete view and its kept strictly to themselves.
To get well ranked in SERPS and in Google’s case push up your PageRank value, be a good supplier to the search engines! Supply relevant, high quality articles from well constructed and linked sites. Apply SEO principles to every possible dimension to attract maximum natural niche traffic.
SEO techniques that drive targeted niche traffic
SEO, past and future
SEO techniques and practices are dynamic and evolve with Internet trends and search engines rule changes.
Existing SEO techniques are relevant to the evolving Internet world but their importance and focus in some respects has and is changing.
Off-page SEO has been considered as more important than off-page SEO for a considerable while though I think there are grounds to challenge this.
The rise of blogs that appear to infiltrate every niche market and Social News websites means that off-page SEO tactics need to evolve and understand expand its thinking and strategies.
There has been controversy over whether the keyword META tag still has any value for some considerable time. Another topic of debate is Google’s relatively new ‘Google Suggest’ which prompts with relevant search terms in real time as you type in your query. It’s thought that this could potentially have a significant impact on optimization. The debate goes on.
SEO practitioners must not only be aware current trends but be able to spot potential future trends. We need to some degree to second guess where the search engines will turn their algorithms next.
From the Internet perspective, social networking is as we all know is coming rapidly to the fore and blogs are relatively commonplace.
Even Corporate companies who have persisted with fixed websites are adding blogs. They now have a perceived value as sales and marketing channels for their products and services.
A future trend maybe that search engines will see the frequency of social engagement as a measure of the popularity and importance of a site and use it as another SERPS ranking factor. Interactivity can be measured by social links one way and volume of conversations the other.
One thing we can be sure of is that competition for niche traffic will become fiercer as more players enter the Internet marketplace. This is likely to force niche markets to become narrower focusing on more specific but deeper segments perhaps based on one or two keywords or phrases. This in turn will raise the value of content relevancy.
The future looks exciting and significantly more challenging from our perspective as SEO practitioners and website and blogs owners who will need to raise the bar!
SEO activities
The following sections are not meant to be exhaustive dissertations of SEO practices or how to drive niche traffic but intended to provide broad brush stroke views of the salient points. More information is provided elsewhere on this blog and of course you can contact us directly.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO is mainly related to building links. So what does this really mean?
Traditional SEO Link building methods focus on building backlinks to your site. This can be hard and tedious work with little reward. Benefits don’t appear overnight as some might claim.
However the effort is worth it and should be viewed as a medium to long term investment. Backlinks that are not part of a reciprocal arrangement are very important from an off-page SEO perspective.
They add significant value to our sites especially if the links are from pages with a high PageRank value.
Traditionally we are very guarded about linking to other sites simply because they are a valuable commodity in their own right. The practice of building links can have risks attached especially if you have pages with high value PageRanks.
Consider an alternative approach to today’s more traditional approach to link building.
An alternative view might be to approach it as a method of building relationships between sites and as a PR exercise. If you offer to shake someone’s hand, most people respond.
Although there has been much controversy over the value of reciprocal links, a backlink from a site with a high PageRank value is worth its weight in gold. It gives your site credibility and a value from the search engine perspective. It is a vote for your site from an authority within your niche which has significant weight with search engines.
I personally don’t know of penalties being applied by search engines for reciprocal linking provided that the links are relevant and properly implemented.
Initially this approach needs an outgoing link. Before considering this, research your target sites to ensure that any link they provide will add value to your site.
So what are our objectives and expected benefits from building links
To clearly understand our objectives, the first task should be a formalized link building strategy so we are clearly focused!
Linking Strategy
From an overarching perspective, our strategy should give us a clear view of what we are trying to achieve, how we are going to achieve it and what the expected timescales are likely to be. We have to be realistic about timescales because link building is not a quick win!
Our strategy can be comprehensive or detailed or just a framework to operate within. The choice is ours. What it must do in either case is provide a roadmap from where we currently are to our destination.
Personally, I have found that Linking Strategies work well if they are well defined, precise and with clearly stated objectives. Over time they also provide a history of what works and what doesn’t
Some questions our strategy should take into account:
About the linking strategy objectives
Have we got clear objectives for this link building exercise and target timescales?
How many links do we currently have and what type of links are they?
What type of links are we going to build? Deep links or just to the home page?
Have we defined the benefits we want receive from this linking campaign?
How are we going to track the campaign’s progress?
What are we going to do to check and maintain links once established?
Target Websites of Blogs we want to link to us
Have we defined the types of websites we trying to target?
Which niches are the in and is it worth categorising them?
What typically are the keywords and keyphrases they target?
How are we going to find these websites and what are the targeting criteria?
Have we checked that the targets will not harm our current rankings?
Have we identified the web pages we want links from?
Why should they link to us?
Does our blog or website have sufficient high quality content to encourage people to link to it?
Why should anyone link to a particular page? What does it offer them?
Does our page content present a commercial threat to out target web sites?
Is the content suitable on the page we want to encourage people to link to?
Are we going to use link baiting techniques?
Approaching the target websites for links
How are we going to approach the target groups or categories of target websites?
What approach techniques are we going to use?
Are there different techniques for each group?
Are there different techniques for each group?
Linking building to Social News sites
The link building strategy perspective in terms of targeting Social News sites doesn’t really change but in practice links are more easily achieved and considerably quicker!
Social news sites have evolved to the point where they are often the first place many people look to find what’s worth reading.
Most have different categories which often break down into smaller groups. Explore these niches and sub-niche markets and focus on those that will bring you benefit.
Engage in the conversations on these sites to establish links and raise your profile.
These activities will bring you targeted niche traffic, can be fun to work with and are potentially a quicker way to establish your site from the popularity linking perspective. We also need to consider that some Blogs have high PageRank scores from the Goggle perspective.
If your site has value and relevancy within your niche market, readers of social news websites may also link from theirs.
The higher personal profile you create by engagement in social news sites, the more readily people will want to link to you as a perceived authority.
It is worth noting that more businesses are now establishing blogs which are beginning to be seen as sales and marketing channels for their products and services which potentially opens other doors.
Link baiting
Link baiting could be described as anything we create on our site that attracts people enough so they link to the bait or the web site or blog as a result of it.
We should endeavour to write all of our content so that it acts as link bait. That means that it is keyword or keyphrase focused, is well written, is search engine optimized, has a high degree of relevancy to our niche market and has something significant, instructive or valid to say. There is no point if it hasn’t!
So you could argue that all of our content should be of such a high quality that it in itself will act as link bait and generate back links provided the content is socialised.
If we take a look at newspaper’s and magazines and see how they sell copy. It is by sensational headlines, photographs and by-lines above the fold.
There are direct Internet based parallels today we can use to sell our copy such as Social News and Video sites. It’s a successful method of generating links very quickly.
Having said all of that, we should be novel in the way we approach link baiting. We are attracted by competitions, controversy, outrage, humour, freebies and the list goes on. Our headlines must be niche and keyword relevant but they don’t have to be boring!
It is impossible to discuss all aspects of linking on an overview page of Off-page SEO like this. Please look out for future posts on subjects like Deep linking, link weighing and others in future posts. Alternatively contact us to discuss how we could work together and apply SEO to your site or blog.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO covers work carried out on our website, its pages, blog pages or posts. Typically it should cover the following:
- Carry out competitive analysis from an SEO perspective.
- Ensure that the web site or blog’s construction is based on SEO principles.
- Carry out in-depth keyword and keyphrase research.
- Optimise content with keywords and keyphrases.
- SEO the title and META tags on your website or blog.
- Search Engine Optimize menus, links and ALT tags amongst others.
- Look at controlling Search Engine spiders crawling routes
These are other aspects but in essence it is being the good supplier as mentioned earlier on this page.
Keywords, keyphrases and tags
Keywords and keyphrases represent the language used in our target niche market. They are the keys that Search Engines use when matching Internet user queries to website and blog content.
In conjunction with other factors they have a high impact on how highly our site is listed in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
The importance of carrying out in-depth keyword and keyphrase research and following up with well optimised niche relevant content cannot be over emphasised.
Although it’s true to say that the META “keywords” tag is not used by all search engines, it is used by some and should be filled in for the sake of completeness. The most important keywords or phrases go to the left, the least important to the right.
The META “description” tag provides the brief description displayed in the SERPs listings. This is a prime target for including keywords and phrases. The keywords should be related to those in the page META“keywords” tag and if possible, the URL.
General site construction
Menu items including the title tag should include keywords and keyphrases where possible.
Menus should be ordered to provide a naturally related and linked flow through subject areas on a site. A keyword/keyphrase pyramid is a useful technique that helps to achieve this and bring structure to a blog or website.
Every opportunity to optimize should be exercised; In the case of a blog for example, category names, associated slugs and descriptions should all be SEO’d. (This equates to document directories on rigid sites) tags should be treated in a similar way.
Many website visitors do not read the text on a web page but scan for highlighted keywords , keyphrases or other divisions created by using H1, H2, H3 and H4 title divisions.
We should ensure that we provide these reference points for the Internet user. They also are important to the search engine spiders to understand the relevance and construction of a document.
On-page SEO Links
As said before in the last section, web visitors tend to scan web pages focusing on aspects of the page that stand out such as keywords, phrases and headlines etc.
In the same way link anchor test should also be prominent but equally be part of the natural language of the page content.
Not only should we use link text which is keyword or keyphrase rich for normal optimisation reasons but also because this type of link text gives the reader a clue as to what is on the other end of the link. The click though rate is very likely to be higher with a descriptive link that is easily identifiable by the reader
Avoid link text like ‘Click here’ which is all too commonly used.In the case of internal linking, we are in control of what, where and how we implement links. It is our choice.
When another site or blog links to us, we are not in control but we can influence the web master in how they link back to us.
The more relevant linking text we put on our pages, the easier it is for other webmaster to cut and copy the text straight onto their pages to implement their link back to our site. This not only means that we should provide suitable content based linking text but also ensure that our titles and subtitles are also optimized so they can be used too.
We should use clear, keyword rich descriptive natural language in linking text so the reader knows what to expect even if the link is read out of context of the article.
We should also ensure that we complete the
Sources of natural niche traffic and other opportunities for off-page SEO
We tend to focus on search engines, websites, blogs and social sites when discussing linking. Bear in mind that they are not the only sources of natural niche traffic.
There are many other places on the Internet where we can not only learn more about our respective niche markets and how to market to them but also generate significant volumes of targeted traffic if we approach the task correctly.
Consider Yahoo groups, Google groups and MSN groups. Most of the search engines also have Answer sections.
All of the major user groups I have looked at, contain smaller niche groups, some of which are divided again into micro niches, very narrow but deep and worth considering in terms of niche marketing.
The question is whether or not your blog or website is applicable to these groups?
Equally can your blog or website provide pertinent information to the questions on Yahoo Answers for instance.
There are many other sources for natural niche traffic and linking opportunities on the Internet. They should be explored systematically and exploited.
Summary
This page provides a broad view of the SEO, some of its techniques and relevance to niche traffic. It should be regarded as just a broad brush stroke view.
Please return to the blog because future posts and articles will explore SEO in much greater detail and cover many more related subjects that have not mentioned here.
I hope you have found it useful.
If you have questions or want to discuss your SEO needs, please contact us.
King regards
Chris Nizzi