Winning the Search Engine War

20th June 2006

If you’re a long time website owner with a neighborhood brick and mortar business, there was probably little or no competition for your “niche” in your neighborhood when you built it.

In those days, your website may have gotten all the traffic you needed, and you never thought much about it. 

So lets say you built the site yourself, and you’re trying to improve your websites visibility in the search engines. You’ve already read my SEO 101 article, and done everything that you understand. Now what? How do you capture a larger market share?

In search engine optimization and marketing, you have to go beyond traditional thinking to really capture your target audience and their search habits. As search engines get smarter, so do the customers searching for what they want.

Let’s say you’ve already added some useful relevant content to your website, and you rank pretty well for your main search terms, yet you’re invisible for others. How can you improve? Simple. Just add good quality relavent information to your website about those specific subjects.

If you’re in the flooring business in your town, you need to write about exactly what your customers are looking for. Write for them, and the search engines will follow. Don’t bother trying to guess what the search engines are looking for, give your customers what they’re looking for.

In this case, “city name flooring” or “state name flooring” are safe bets, but you have to get beyond that, and capture the less frequently searched terms, that likely get no competition.  That will give you the edge over your competition.

There are some great tools to help you determine what people are actually looking for.

• Googles keyword suggestion tool 
• Yahoo’s suggestion tool 

Both of those are their free tools for advertising on their pay per click advertising networks, and give you a rough idea of how many people are searching, and exactly what they’re searching for.

Don’t think of the search engines as your enemy in a war, think of the customers as friends you’re trying to gain. Write good articles, on a well structured website that’s technically search engine friendly,  about the things that people want and you will win the customers over, with the help of the search engines.