Each search keyword typed in by a searcher is a market

When writing for the Internet I found it really tough not to get bogged down by the sheer scale of the topic I was writing about - and this is the relatively specialist niche of Koi Ponds...

As I progressed with one train of thought I ended up with several others and then I would write about those and end up with pages of one article that dealt with more than one theme and I was dazed, lost and confused! I had so much to say and so little space to say it in - and if you think I am joking you clearly haven't tried writing about something that is your passion yet! You will very quickly uncover that there is an phenomenal amount of words in your head that need to get onto paper, errm, I mean webpages!

How do you sort all this out?

Fortunately the concept of writing themed pages, which we are drumming into you, helps you organise your thoughts into collective, structured web pages! This is more of the science of Internet success as opposed to the art side of things.

I found that the one example that has always stuck with me and has always, always helped me keep focus about how cruel the Internet can be, is the fruit store or greengrocer...

Imagine you walked into a fruit store with the intention of buying an apple. One apple. No more no less.

Picture that apple in your head.

And now go to Google and find someone to sell you that EXACT apple online.

On the Internet you see, an apple is not an apple!!!

Why?

If I typed 'apple' into Google, what do you think I am likely to see in the results? All top ten are about Apple computer (at least at the time I tried it). What does this tell us? If we are online competing in the Apple market, we have serious competition from a company that has absolutely nothing to do with the fruit we are trying to sell.

So what if I realised that 'apple' on it's own is a terrible search phrase (most one word searches are pretty much useless) and I then typed in 'red apple'? Result number two happens to be a fruit farm that sells red apples http://www.redapplefarm.com. Whoo hoo - this is great if I happen to be selling red apples - I have matched my customer with their need.

But what about all the people who are looking for green apples? My fruit stores sells those too! And sure enough, redapplefarm.com doesn't feature in the green apple search category...

And what about 'small red apples' or 'red apples for cooking' or 'stewed red apples'?

Don't even get me started on bananas!

Do you see the point folks? This is a simple fruit store! And we have masses of work to do just to compete on the Internet for the tiny niche market of simple apples... Imagine how much work we have to do to become well ranked for all the fruit that we sell?

Take heart. It is not impossible. It is about focussing on your NICHE. Your niche, no matter how small, is amazingly complex when we break it down into it's smaller sub niches. This is what we mean about themed web pages. Note that each theme needs to revolve around each nice. So if we wanted to dominate the apple sales market for all our apples we would need a page around each niche. So one web page might be about 'red apples'. The next would be about 'small red cooking apples', which is NOT the same thing as 'red apples', even though it falls under the same much broader theme!

The more specific a web page is, and the more it relates to the general theme of your website the better! Slowly you will start to attract visitors who are only interested in 'small red cooking apples' and nothing else. As these specialist pages build up on your site, the theme of the site emerges and as it does so do the search engine results! Google in particular starts to understand that you are an authority on 'red apples' and that you also happen to know something about fruit in particular and that if he sends a visitor your way that visitor is likely to benefit from having visited your site! And that leaves a good impression on the visitor of Google's ability to find information that that visitor found MEANINGFUL and RELEVANT at that moment in time!

The Golden Rule:

You must always think about your visitor first and the search engine second. Your page must be targeted, relevant and meaningful to your VISITOR, and your visitor should feel that you have given them the information that they wanted, right there and then.

If your subject starts to run away with you it is an indication that you need to break it down into smaller niches. You will see that is what we do on each of our sites - we break each bigger piece down into smaller, more manageable chunks and it is these chunk that start to get us traffic.

We are ethical South African search engine optimization practitioners based in Johannesburg, Gauteng. Internet marketing efforts in South Africa are still in their infancy.  Search engine marketing and search engine positioning is built around 3 basic concepts - organic search engine optimization, optimizing for PPC (pay per click) campaigns and site functionality. All three areas must work together to succeed.

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