I received this question in a comment on my “SEO Expert Q&A” starter post, so here goes:

Comment by Dan on April 26, 2007 12:45 pm
Lara,

Could you please comment on a keyword research service called nichebot.com and if the kei is really such a good indicator of a good opportunity. I noticed that the title tag google competition results are not really accurate… have you seen this before?

Thanks for your question, Dan.

First let me start by saying that I don’t use nichebot, and I haven’t really dug into it too much, since they won’t let you do anything if you’re not willing to pay a dollar to try it out. I don’t like “squeeze pages” (the page that you’re brought to when you try to click on something that scrolls a mile long with calls to action in bright bold red every other block - they reek of “quick money making scheme” to me) and I dislike them so much that whenever I come across one, I click out and go find something else. Yep, I know - they only seem to want a dollar for a 14-day trial. But I just don’t trust anyone who’s still using pages like that.

That said, let me delve a little deeper into the whole keyword research thing. There are lots of ways to figure out if a niche or topic is going to be profitable for you. I personally use WordTracker - but honestly, I only use it to get more ideas on related topics for a term I’m already interested in, and I pay absolutely zero attention to the KEI analysis. In fact, I don’t even include it in the keyword list I send to clients when I’m seeking approval on targeted words and phrases. Keyword research is the absolute tip of the iceberg, and depending on what you’re doing and how far you can expand your mind, using any keyword discovery tool might not be necessary at all.

Let’s say for example that you’re wanting to build a site about fishing in the Great Lakes region of New York. The very first thing I would do if you came to me would be to go to the three major search engines and do a search for that (fishing Great Lakes New York) to see what’s already out there.

Google pulls 1,250,000 results
Yahoo pulls 6,190,000 results
MSN pulls 197,166 results

HUGE differences, right? But let’s take a closer look…

The sites listed in the top 10 for each engine are pretty much the same exact sites, just placed in different rankings. Google shows the DEC in #1, while Yahoo puts it in the #4 spot, and MSN tosses it down to #5.

Personally, I’m not scared of 1 million pages, any more than I am of 6 million pages. I’d love to take on this project! What I’d do at this point is use WordTracker (or whatever keyword discovery tool you prefer - even nichebot I suppose) to find other things we can talk about on this site.

A quick pull through WT gives me a lot on Lake Erie fish species; “Lake Erie Bass”, “Lake Erie Walleye”, “Lake Erie Steelhead” and a lot about ecology around the Great Lakes; “Great Lakes watershed”, “Great Lakes environment”, “Great Lakes environmental directory”.

“Lake Erie Bass” shows 10 phrases that have those three words in them. Of those 10 phrases, the predicted search count goes no higher than 7, the actual goes no higher than 4.

Now here’s my magic statement on this: If you could optimize and market your site for that phrase “Lake Erie Bass” in just half these phrase results (5), and got 2 search hits a day for each one (10 hits per day) and 40% of those hits resulted in a sale (4 sales per day), aren’t you doing pretty well? Don’t forget that you’ve got at least 5 other phrases you’ve found to work with, and we’re just talking search traffic here (no other form of advertising).

I know you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, but that’s a small niche. I want something bigger.”

So go bigger! Build a section of your site on Great Lakes fishing, a section on fishing the Mississippi, a section on deep sea fishing in the Atlantic, one on deep sea fishing in the Pacific and so on.

For each section, do the very same thing - check the search results and see what the top 20 or 30 listings are doing. Expand your own mind to think of new ideas, check out how much competition there is by doing manual searches on the topic, and see what other phrases they’re using to target search traffic.

The bottom line here is that if you’re optimizing and marketing the site properly and filling it with good, useful and fresh content you really won’t have to worry about ranking well in the search engines. This goes for any topic and any niche.

If you want to use a program like WordTracker, Nichebot, Keyword Discovery and so on - go ahead and do it. But don’t rely on those temporary results for your permanent work. You need to focus on your niche, expand it to related topics and not worry about what people are searching for - you can’t market your site for “deep sea fishing” if you’re not going to provide enough relevant and useful info on it to begin with and expect to get anywhere in the search engines anyway.

Popularity: 16% [?]

More and more I’m getting questions from new and potential clients, “What is that funny button on my site?” and when I reply with “It’s your RSS feed link,” I get, “Okay, and what the *bleep* is RSS?”

Today’s question comes on the tail of a redesign I just completed for a long-standing client, and a new project I took on the other day, where both clients asked me about RSS and that “funny button”.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and basically, when using a blog system in publishing, your posts are automatically published to an RSS feed. People can then subscribe to your site’s feed using a feed reader, and get content delivered automatically “right to their (computer) door.”

Think of it this way: When a television show goes into syndication, it gives the opportunity for other networks to re-air episodes of the show. The original network is the only one that gets to air new episodes, but I’ve seen as many as 3 other stations picking up the syndication. So fans of the show can then see these episodes at varying times (when it’s convenient for them) and can count on another network to air the show. It’s similar with RSS - someone finds your site, decides they like it, and copies your syndication feed into their feed reader (their own personal station) so they can get the goods when it’s convenient for them. In this case, the website itself is the “original network station” and the feed reader is the “syndicate”.

Before I finish this - Let me state that just because you’re syndicating a website, it does NOT give you permission to re-air it on your own website. If a site offers feeds, you’re allowed to “watch” on your own computer, and are usually NEVER (except in very rare circumstances, and only when stated by the site’s owner) allowed to redistribute the content in any way, shape, or form. Feel free to discuss and link to it though - site owners love incoming links.

So basically, having a feed reader on your computer allows you to subscribe to your favorite web sites and pull content much like creating your very own personal newspaper! I use Feedreader, but there are several to choose from: My Yahoo!, GoogleReader, and BlogLines are just a few.

And providing RSS feeds on your website, allows people to subscribe to your site’s feed and get the latest news and information you publish right in their feed reader so they get “alerted” to your new content! It’s pretty cool, huh?

For other great posts explaining RSS, please visit the following:
RSS Explained for the Blogging Newbie
How To Explain RSS the Oprah Way

Popularity: 21% [?]

Today’s question refers to “web site builders” for standard HTML websites.

Dear Lara,

I’m in a quandry about a few things and was wondering if you could help. I have a site that I built using one of those web site builders that you find all over the ‘net. I was in a rush to get “something” up there, and it was just too quick and easy for me at the time since it was offered to me when I registered my domain name and set up the hosting.

Now that I think about it, I’m wondering if hiring a company to do a customized design for me would fare me better in the long run. I don’t know how to code HTML or anything like that - this was essentially a “point and click” type of setup.

I’m worried that it’s too boring and “amateur-ish”. I’m worried that there’s code in there that might be a hinderance in terms of search engine optimization. I’m worried that if I ever do really want to get into doing some serious Internet marketing that it would be a waste of money on a site that’s not “up to par”.

What do you think?

Sincerely,
Pamela B.
{last name and site address removed for privacy}

Thanks for your great question, Pamela! And first and foremost, stop worrying so much!

The real answer here isn’t a cut-and-dried answer, I’m sorry to say. There are lots of factors to think about when building a web site and code is definitely one of them. The bottom line is that if you can’t read code, you have no real idea what’s in there that could be a problem for you in terms of SEO or anything else, so you’re either going to have to take the time to learn enough HTML code or find someone who can help you decipher what’s going on “behind the scenes”.

That said, most of what I’ve seen in terms of “DIY” websites makes them very un-search engine friendly. Very often there are “frames”, where each page is displayed next to or below a menu and the search engines can never get to the true URL of each individual page. There’s also typically a lack of CSS (cascading style sheets) files that are used to make changes “globally” in a snap. Decided you prefer black text on a white background all of the sudden? You’ll likely have to go through and make those changes individually on each page. The graphics you’re provided are rarely what you really want, and often the file sizes are large which make the pages load more slowly.

Oh, I could go on and on…

That said, there’s been a lot of talk on the internet lately about “ugly sites” and how it doesn’t always mean that a company is bad if their site is “ugly”. In a very small way, I can see the point - Let’s say you run a mom-and-pop laundromat. You offer your website up with tips on stain removal, list your hours, maybe some details on your machines and “amenities”, and hand out some coupons for dry cleaning. Do you NEED to market your site to the world? Does it NEED to look like you’re running this “high class” place? It’s a single location, and costs about $2.00 to wash and dry a load of laundry. So no, you don’t want to drive people away by making them think you’re expensive, and you don’t need to have people across the country find you. (However this is not an excuse to not do any online marketing at all! It simply means you can probably spend less than you’d think, because you’re geo-targeting your traffic.)

So yes, it does depend on your situation whether or not you should try to do-it-yourself or hire an outside company. A basic, well-designed site won’t cost you a mint, but will always make life easier in terms of SEO and marketing if it’s done professionally from the start. If you’re looking to get into more in terms of marketing (ie. you’re not running a local laundromat, but rather an online business that serves or attracts people from around the country or world), then yes, my opinion is that you should fork out the cash to have the site redone professionally so that you can pursue a successful online marketing campaign. And please - don’t take your DIY site to an SEO and tell them you don’t want to redesign or re-code it! You should never do that with any site, as part of SEO is making the site search engine friendly, and there’s no way an SEO can do that without digging into the back end of the site or re-arranging things!

Thanks again for your letter, Pamela!

To send your own questions to us and possibly have it posted here, email us at ask@anubismarketing.com!

Popularity: 16% [?]

Today’s question hails from {site removed for privacy} Don:

Don asks:

[Company name removed] is offering to sell me keywords for $800 each. They say that my site will pop up on top of all results IF the searcher has downloaded their program. They say over 10 million people have it loaded already. What can you do for me for that much money?

Don, thank you for your question!

If I understand this correctly, they’re offering to sell you ONE keyword for $800, and that the only way your site will show up is if the person searching is using their “special” program, right?

And over 10 million users? Wow, that’s a lot, considering their domain was only registered in May of this year, their Alexa ranking is close to one million (which essentially means that they are the one millionth (1,061,673 to be exact, as of today) most popular site on the internet).

I have a hard time believing this will do you or your site any good at all, for a bunch of reasons. First and foremost that I’ve never even heard of that company, nor have I ever heard of that tactic to get clients. What it sounds like is the old quacky emails people would get offering them “150 links to your site for $99!”. Okay, but what kind of links? Are they relevant to my niche? Are they all hosted on the same server, and owned by the same company? That last one was so typical at one point, where I’d get requests for link exchanges for a client who owned a bed and breakfast on a supposed dental resource site!

Another thing I found, was that according to Google, Yahoo, Alexa, and MSN - there are NO sites linking to them. Not a single one. Wouldn’t you think that if a company’s service were THAT well used, and THAT fantastic, that people would be linking to it?

Here’s the bottom line - if it sounds like anything other than natural, organic listings in the search engines that EVERYONE uses, it’s more than likely some sort of scam that’s not only NOT going to get you what you could get by hiring a real SEO/Marketing company, but it could wind up hurting your site in the long run. The search engines are well known for penalizing sites that use trickery or sneaky tactics for getting listings. Is that what you want for your company? I doubt it.

Depending on your site’s current listings, current rankings, and where you’re willing to make changes, as well as your budget, we can develop a plan to get you NATURAL results that are available to anyone and everyone using the search engines (as they are, without “special software”) to find you, as well as people who are using directories or other authority sites to find you. And it might even wind up being less money!

(Don, I’ll be contacting you privately to discuss what Anubis Marketing can do for you “for that kind of money” since it largely depends upon your site specifically.)

Popularity: 17% [?]

We’ve decided to add a new, exciting feature to the site called “Ask Anubis Marketing - SEO Expert Q&A”!

With this, you can email us an SEO or Internet Marketing related question, and once a week, we’ll select a question or two to be answered by our experts, and post it right here on the site!

If you need a little more than a brief answer, please feel free to contact us about our consulting services.

Popularity: 54% [?]