Thursday, October 28, 2010

What are Market, Niche, and a Micro Niche?

I'm planning to put up my own website where I can apply all the things that I've learned regarding SEO.  First thing to take note in putting up a website is to know what your market is. 

So, what really is a market? A market is a community of people who share a common interest in a particular subject or activity.  Often this community has its own language made up of terms and acronyms that only makes sense to other members of the community.

For us to have a clear view of what a market is here are examples:

Market
Area of Interest
Market Language
photographers photography
  • SLR Cameras
  • Canon/Nikon
  • macro shots
web developers web development
  • javascript
  • asp.net web applications
  • server side or client side scripting
bloggersblogging
  • blogs
  • Google AdSense
  • blog directories

One of these markets is the market that I'm considering to use in my website as these are the things that I'm currently interested at the moment. 

After deciding what our target market is, we have to identify our niche.

In every market, there are multiple niches.  A niche is a subset of a market that relates to a specific topic.  Here are examples of a niche:

Market
Example of Niches
photographers
  • digital photography basics
  • photography course
  • wedding photography
web developers
  • asp.net web applications
  • php web applications
  • open source web development
bloggers
  • blog host
  • blog softwares
  • free blog sites


Once we have identified the different niches of our market, we now have to identify its micro-niches.  Micro-niches are niches within niches.  Here are examples of micro-niches:

Market
Niche
Micro-Niche
photographers digital photography basics digital photography guide
photography course Canon photography course
wedding photography famous wedding photographers
web developers asp.net web applications c# web development
php web applications php web development tools
open source web development open source applications
Bloggers blog host best blog hosting service
blog softwares open source blog software
free blog sites most popular free blog sites

Now that I've identified the different markets, niches, and micro-niches that I'm interested to engage in, the next step is to identify the keywords which are related to our market niches.  This will be discussed in my next post.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Popular Blog Directories to Submit Our Blog

In connection to my previous post, here is an article that my friend gave me which can help the popularity of our blog.

Most of them are not free.  What's your experience with these websites?

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Increase Your Blog’s Popularity with the Help of Technorati

While I was working, my friend Pat Ambrosio messaged me and told me that he saw my blog and gave me some tips on how to make my blog popular. One of those is to submit my blog to Technorati.  As I am new to blogging and I am not aware of it, I immediately checked the site. 

According to the FAQ section of the site, by claiming our blog, our blog will be added in the Technorati’s Blog Directory under the categories that we have specified.  We may also add tags for our blog so that our blog will be listed in their Tag pages for those tags.  With that, Technorati users will be able to see our blogs under the categories and tags that we’ve specified.  Also, if our blogs are doing well, our blogs may be listed in the Technorati Top 100.  

Here are the steps on how to claim our blog in Technorati:
  1. Go to the Technorati homepage and log in using your account by clicking the Sign In link.  If you don’t have an account yet, click the Join link and register.
  2. If you are now logged in, click your username beside the [sign out] link to access your profile.
  3. Start claiming your blog by providing your blog’s URL and click the Claim button.
  4. Fill in all the necessary fields and make sure to provide a good title and description for your site, as this will market your site to your target readers.  Also, make sure to select the correct category and tags for your site.
  5. Click the Proceed to the next step button.
  6. An e-mail will be sent to you containing your claim token.
  7. Verify your blog by posting something in your blog containing the claim token.  You may want to delete your post after verifying it.
  8. Go to your Technorati account and click the “Check Claim” button.  I’m not sure how long it takes Technorati to show this in your profile page.  Some say it only took them almost a day but some say it took forever for this option to show up.   In my case, it took almost a week for this option to become visible in my account page.  Now that this option is visible in my account page, I need to wait until Technorati crawls my site.
  9. After a day, Technorati is now crawling my blog.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

On-Page Factors Dissected


Before we talk about the different strategies that we’re going to use in order for us to improve our rankings, we need to familiarize ourselves first with the on-page factors which will be crucial in building our strategy.  I’m talking about the different tags that are normally found in the upper section of our HTML page (as shown in Figure 1).  So, let’s dissect the different html tags and discuss how it will help us in our strategies. Here are some concepts from the Google Best Practices Guide by Jerry West.

 Figure 1

  1. DTD Statement – It is the first tag on a webpage and we need to make sure to use the correct tag.  Codes written in HTML 3.2 might cause problems if HTML 4.01 is declared in our DTD statement.  For us to verify if we are using the correct tag, we can double check it in this site.  Testing shows that having this tag in place not only allows our site to load faster in major browsers, but also allows faster indexing.
  2. Character Set Tag – This tag tells the browser how to display the text and this should be defined before any text appears in the browser.
  3. Title Tag – The title tag is the text that users normally see at the top of the web browser window.  It is also the linked text in the search results of all major search engines.  All search engines index the Title tag, that’s why it is important for us to choose the proper title.  It is not advisable to place the company name in this tag because what we want is for our Title to grab attention, create curiosity, and evoke emotion to get customers to click on it.  Our Title must be brief and concise because Google will only display up to the first 65 characters.  Also, please take note not to use duplicate or near duplicate Titles across a site because it can harm a site’s ranking power.
  4. Meta Description Tag – When users perform a search, the results displayed are usually the Title Tag and the Description Tag.  If a Description Tag was not supplied, by default, the browser will use the first 30-40 words on the page, which may be critical because those words may not accurately describe the services that our site offers.  Thus, we have to make sure that the content of our Description Tag contains our focused keyword phrases (we’ll discuss keyword phrases in my future entries).  We must also limit the content of our Description Tag to 165 characters or less.
  5. Meta Keyword Tag – Use 6-8 keywords phrases in the Meta Keyword Tag but make sure not to include “money phrases” (highest converting phrases) because the Keyword Tag is the first place where competitors look to steal information and we do not want that to happen.  Please note that Google already stopped indexing this tag while Bing and Yahoo! are still indexing this.
  6. Robots Tag – By default, the value is “index, follow”.  This means that the search engine will index the page and follow links on this page.  If we want our page to be indexed and followed by major search engines, it’s better not to include this tag because it makes no difference.  However, we may add this tag to pages which are not important for SEO like Contact Us, Privacy Policy, and Terms of Use pages by simply adding the tag and instead of “index, follow” value we use “noindex, nofollow” or a combination of the options.  Another way of doing this is by creating a robots.txt file.  To understand more about robots.txt, please visit this site.
  7. Google Sitemap – This is the best way to get a site crawled and deeply indexed.  We’ll discuss more of this in my future entries.

Friday, October 1, 2010

What is SEO?

Imagine how many websites and blogs are out there. What are the odds that a user will just suddenly land in your website and find some time to browse everything that’s written in it? 

How do you make your website popular and create traffic for your site?  Some say you have to make your site visually pleasing.  Others say that the content is more important.  I believe that these two factors are essential, but what’s the point of all of this if no one is visiting your site?  That’s where SEO kicks in.

As defined by Wikipedia, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a webpage in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a website web presence.

What we all want to achieve is to make our website rank in the first or second page of the major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!.  Let’s face it – how many of us actually make the effort to browse the search results all the way to the last page?  Personally, I normally browse up to the 3rd page, and after that, I start typing in a new keyword if I was not able to find what I’m looking for.  Thus, the higher the rank of our website in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), the higher the chance a user will visit our site.

What are the strategies that we need to do in order for us to achieve that? That’s what we’re going to discuss in my future blog entries so make sure to watch for it.

The Reason for this Blog

My friend Julls asked what’s wrong with me because for the past few days or weeks, I’ve been acting weird.  Before, I usually spent my free time drinking and hanging out with my friends.  But now, I’d rather stay at home and try to do something productive. 

Maybe there is a point in your life when you get tired of the routine things that you usually do and want to explore new things.  That’s when I started reading different blog entries from different blog sites and even subscribed through RSS feeds.  This made me realize how outdated I am in a lot of things in the field of technology, politics, and even celebrity gossip.  It made me think of putting up my own blog. Unfortunately, I can’t think of an interesting article to write.  By the way, I don’t love reading and writing.

I’m a .Net developer and I do love my work as a developer.  In my previous job, I worked in an SEO company where I was asked to create a ranking tool that will automate the pulling of the ranks of the keywords for a given domain.  I was a bit exposed to the SEO industry but I am not fully familiar with the ins and outs of it, that’s why I became interested and wanted to familiarize myself with this. I then talked to my friend who works in an SEO company and asked for his help to guide me in my quest to familiarize myself and hopefully do SEO on my own.

I’m putting up this blog because I want this to be an avenue for readers like me who want to learn how SEO works.  I’ll be posting all the things that I’ll be learning from my friend and things that I researched on my own.  Readers are encouraged to comment and share anything related to the topic.