You may have seen those internet marketing “programs” that specialize in helping folks develop “niche web sites”. The premise is to search out keywords and keyword combinations that get a lot of hits, but don’t have many websites serving that niche. Viola’, you’ve found a lucrative niche.

This approach makes me cringe.

It relies on “gaming” the system…finding loopholes, as it were. And as is with all loopholes, they eventually go away. Suddenly your $10K/mo. site drops to $500/mo. because Google changed their search algorithm. Or it could happen more gradually — other “niche” marketers figure out that there is a lot of interest in “blue frog statues”, and your share of the market dwindles.

In a lot of ways, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a game too, one where the rules keep changing. I heard recently that there are 60+ factors on your web pages that affect your search engine ranking. For most of us, it’s impossible to keep up, and dauntingly expensive to hire a pro to do it for us.

My advice: Learn a little about search engine optimization and keywords. If you find it intriguing, do a little more. Just don’t go nuts and spend a lot of time and money. What’s more important is having the right titles, using the right language on your sales page, and providing the information that your customers want and will take action on — not how frequently you repeat the keywords, or what you put in your meta tags.

Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Their methods and algorithms are just the mechanics of how they decide what is useful. Keep your eye on making your site useful, ask your customers for feedback to keep improving, and leave the SEO game to someone else.

Last 5 posts by Terri Zwierzynski

• The Grateful Life of a Solo Entrepreneur - November 17th, 2008
• Can a Lifestyle be a Niche? - November 4th, 2008
• Social Networking: Top 10 Tips for Twitter Success - November 3rd, 2008
• Virtual Book Tour: Becoming an Online Business Manager - October 20th, 2008
• Link correction: Viral Twitter Tactics - October 13th, 2008

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 16th, 2006 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Niche Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.