Hi
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Sunday July 5th 2009: Update #133
This Update is normally published three times per week for opted-in subscribers only. Publisher: Rich Sale. Your comments are always welcome - to respond to anything you read here, please leave a comment
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Well it’s another hot day in the UK but a bit more cloud in the sky as we await the start of the Wimbledon Mens Final today.
I took the dogs out early this morning before it got too hot. Henry the 11 year old Long Haired German Shepherd has still got a fair bit of go in him but he tends to use his energy more effectively than Sparky the 1 year old Field Spaniel. We rounded a corner this morning to find a large Ginger Tom cat sitting in our path. Both dogs were on the leash so the normal procedure would be for both dogs to leap into attack mode take up any slack in the leash and make it pretty clear that a chase would be on if they were given the chance. This would normally be enough for any cat and it would quickly retire to watch from a safe distance. The dogs would then maintain the aggressive stance for a while then consider it a moral victory and continue on with the walk.
The first part of the plan was executed with speed and enthusiasm as usual. But then someone changed the rules! The cat just stayed put arched it’s back and squared up for a fight. Henry the German Shepherd snarled and showed his scary array of ‘cat eating’ teeth but the cat just stood it’s ground and started hissing and spitting. Now a German Shepherd in full attack mode is a scary experience which is why they are great guard dogs. To a cat it must look even more scary but this one was not showing any fear. Neither dog was tight on the leash at this point. So Henry took a step forwards which was immediately countered by the hissing cat but now with flailing, claw showing paws! Henry took a step back to stay out of range. The not-so-smart Spaniel however who is driven by instinct rather than self preservation tried to get a piece of the action and with fearless stupidity stepped forwards. The cat just turned and planted a paw across Sparky’s nose leaving a nice set of scratch marks. I pulled Sparky away and Henry just turned and followed still snarling at the cat but carefully staying out of range.
The lesson here is ‘By all means size up your competition but be prepared to back down if the potential gain does not match the effort required to win! Why fight a battle if it’s not worth winning! I fear that Sparky will take his time to fully understand this.
OK I hear you say so what the heck has this to do with Search Engine Promotion and Internet Marketing.
Well quite a lot really. I get to talk to many site owners (business and personal) and obviously most of them know that getting targeted traffic is everything. Without traffic any website must be considered a waste of internet space and equally any effort that is put into it will be wasted.
Now many just don’t understand how it all works. They just assume that it is enough to put up a website and some magic will come to play that gets them traffic.
But there are those like you, who know that they need to work with keywords and keyword phrases related to their business or niche. But still many people just target the impossible and assume that by some miracle it is going to work for them. There is absolutely no point in targeting highly competitive keywords and phrases for your website content or articles from day one. These are battles that are going to be difficult to win so why bother? Pick your fight with keywords that are less competitive that still have some decent traffic. Go for keyword phrases that are more specific as actually these will convert better. If you start to win the smaller keyword battles you will also start to rank for the more competitive ones as well.
As a rule I look for keywords that get more than 30 searches per day and that have less than 30,000 competing pages when you do a search on Google with the keyword phrase in quotation marks. Another great indicator is the allintitle command which allows you to search for pages with the search string in the page title.
Just write allintitle:+dog +grooming +school in the Google search box and the results that come back will only contain those which contain the words ‘dog’ and ‘grooming’ and ’school’ in the title. You can obviously use your own keywords. But why is this useful? Well if someone is really serious about ranking for a keyword phrase then they will include that phrase in the page title. So allintitle is a great way of sizing the real competition before you start the fight.
You can see how to do this keyword research and much more in my ‘How To Wake Up Your Silent Salesman’ eBook which you can get here http://www.the-silent-salesman.com/wakeup.html .
But either way make sure you pick your Keyword Fights with care because it’s Not just about winning It’s about winning the right battles if you want your site to succeed.
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In Update #131 (which you can see here http://bit.ly/4h7u5 ) I mentioned that I would would be tracking progress with generating traffic from articles. Well I thought it would also be good to show you the process I have been using from start to finish. So that you can replicate this for yourselves.
So here is a short video I have prepared about article title selection http://bit.ly/ODfR5
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The next newsletter will be on Thursday.
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So until next time
To Our Success
Rich
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