Most people who visit your website will read a little then move on so capturing the details of those people is paramount to your business success.

Niche selection and Keyword selection are the foundations of a site which will rank highly in the search engines and attract relevant traffic. We’ve looked at Niche selection, now we’re moving on to find the keywords in our niche that we can target. We’ll continue with our Bass fishing niche. I’m going to build a bass fishing site, even though I know nothing about the subject.

Now we need to do some keyword research on Bass Fishing, first, I’ll show you how to do it for free, then I’ll show you how to do it using the various keyword research tools that i pay for.

So lets head over to the Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool again

We can clearly see that the phrase “bass fishing” is searched for more times than any other related term with 809 searches today. Then we have a couple of terms related to bass fishing games which might represent a seperate sub-niche, followed by bass fishing lures, bass fishing tips etc …

Ten years ago you could have published a site on bass fishing and attracted plenty of traffic. Today, almost every niche has a lot of competing web pages.

Would you rather compete against 1000 other pages, or a million? for first page of Google?

The answer is obvious, but we now need to find out how much competition we have …

Let’s head over to google and find out …

This is how most people search, entering the term bass fishing in Google. The number of results returned is 239,000 – that means that there are 239,000 pages that contain both the words “fishing” and “bass” in ANY ORDER. To find the number of pages that are optimised for the keyphrase bass fishing, type the keyphrase into Google in quotes, like this – “bass fishing”. You’ll find that there are now 235,000 competing results. That’s unusual, you’ll frequently find that the number of pages that are optimised for a particular phrase is considerably lower than the first search without quotes. It’s probably because it’s only a two word phrase.

On the subject of keyword phrases, do you know what percentage of keyword phrases are two word phrases? three word phrases? longer phrases?

At November 2007, Amsterdam based research firm Amstat gave the following numbers:

1 Word 15.2%
2 Words 31.9%
3 Words 27%
4 Words 14.8%
5 Words 6.5%
6 Words 2.7%
7 Words 1.1%
8 Words 0.3%
9 Words 0.2%
10 Words 0.1%
The suggestion is then, that you should target keyword phrases from 2 to 4 words if possible (one word phrases are extremely difficult to rank for).

So, would targetting the phrase “bass fishing” be a sensible option? Ordinarily I’d say no, and in general, you want less than 50,000 results in Google as competition, perhaps 100,000 as a maximum if your promotion activites are good.

But that’s not the end of the story. It makes sense to analyse the result on the first page of Google, to see how stiff the competition is. This is where you could go badly wrong, and waste a huge amount of time, let me explain …

The majority of search engine traffic is currently from the USA at 22% of global searches (followed by China at 10%, Japan at 9%, Germany at 6%, and the UK at 5%). However I live in the UK, and the search results served up to me have a UK bias, in fact each countries’ search results will have this country specific bias. This means that people around the world see different results on the first page of the search engines.

Why is this important

The figures show that I should get almost four times the number of US visitors than UK visitors, so if my website topic has global popularity, it makes sense to analyse the competition in the US, and not the UK.

Analysing the UK results (that’s using the “search the web” radio button, and not “search pages from the UK”) show that the PR of the top ten ranked pages on Google for the keyphrase “bass fishing” without the quotes, ranges from 0-3, and that the number of backlinks varies from 0 to 70.

If I assumed that this really was the global competition, I would actually target the keyphrase as I know that I could beat a number of those pages for ranking.

However, checking the US results gives PR’s in the range 3-6, and backlinks of 8 – 18,300 … and that’s not something that I want to compete with … there are easier targets.

Here’s the software that I now use for keyword analysis, website analysis, backlink analysis and more …

There’s really only one way to increase search engine traffic and that is to improve your rankings in the search engines. This process is known as search engine optimisation or seo for short.

The goal of almost all webmasters, businesses, and entrepreneurs, is to get their website (more accurately web pages) listed at number one on Google for their chosen keyword or keyword phrase. What are the benefits of  being at number one on Google? Well imagine that you held the number one position for the keyphrase “make money” -
GoogleTrends shows us that we could expect 16,667 visitors a day, from Google alone. I don’t care how bad your product offer is, or how bad your sales letter is, with that volume of traffic, YOU WILL MAKE MONEY.

Of course you can see that your “make money” web page will be competing against over 30 million other web pages that all want to be number one for that term. If you manage to beat 99.999% of your competitors (and for that keyphrase, it’s going to takes years, and a lot of money to do that) your web page will show up as result 315 on Google. I’m guessing that’s going to get you about 1 visitor a day … if  you’re lucky.

One tool that I’ve used every day for years to help me track the rankings of my websites for various keywords is SEO Elite. Over on the right you can get a copy of the free course ($89 value) written by the creator of SEO Elite – Brad Callen. The course takes you through the process of researching, then implementing the procedures required to rank for any particular keyword.

Either right click on the image to save the pdf file to your computer, or left click to open the report in a new window.

SEO Elite has proved invaluable to me for targeting and tracking keywords to rank for. To jump straight to the information on SEO Elite click here.

Finally, a top-notch WYSIWYG web page program for the rest of us! Now there’s no need to pay a little fortune for a program to create and edit great-looking web pages, including powerful and easy to use CSS capabilities.

KompoZer is a complete Web Authoring System that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing capabilities found in Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe DreamWeaver and other high end programs.

KompoZer is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.

You can download it at:  http://www.kompozer.net

There are a number of online platforms that allow you to set up a website, or web page on them, one of the best is HubPages.

The reason that it is worth your time adding your content to someone else’s website is that Google and the other search engines regard HubPages (and a number of similar websites) as authority sites. This means that content published there is likey to rank highly in the search engines. Links back from HubPages to your own site also carry authority and help with getting your site ranked highly.

HubPages are easy to set up, just go to www.hubpages.com and follow the instructions. Here’s an example of a quick hub page that I built recently – lake district

There are many reasons for wanting to know how to build a website, from personal or hobby pages, to affiliate marketing sites, right through to full blown business websites.

Unless you are competent at html or website code, and can use a text editor for building your own website, you’ll need to find some website design software. You will also need to making a decision on website hosting, and domain names

Your Options Are:
Use a free website builder / Buy website building software Use 3rd party hosting / Buy a domain name and host the site yourself.

I guess if you are asking how to create a website, then you are a relative newbie, so here’s my tips for going live on the web:

Head on over to www.blogger.com – You will need a Google account, if you already have one, sign in and follow the simple tutorial to build your website (actually it’s a blog – but a blog is just a type of website), if you don’t already have a Google account, you’ll need to create one first. Either way, you should be ready to create your first website in a matter of minutes.

Write a post, publish it, and congratulations, you now know how to create a website – totally free. Remember to make a note of the url of your site, then go back and check your site, and if you see errors, you can quickly edit them, then re-publish.

Similarly, you can build a WordPress blog for free, but it’s a little more difficult to set up, you’ll find the instructions at www.wordpress.org

If you can make your own website for free, and get free hosting into the bargain, why does anyone bother to buy a domain name, buy website building software, and purchase hosting, before creating their own website?

The answer really depends on how serious you are about your website, and that means, how serious you are about other people, apart from your friends and family, seeing your work. If your site is in any way commercial, and you intend to make money from it, you need to pay close attention right now … The reasons are these:

The website building software that you can use blogger is limited in its capability, it’s going to look like a blogger blog no matter what you do. WordPress on the other hand can be customised however you want, but it’s technically difficult to do so.

On the other hand, you’ll find that you have plenty of choice when it comes to buying website building software. All you have to do is select the one that performs the functions you want, and learn to use it.

Naturally, you will want people to find your websites on the search engines, this means that they have to rank higher than other competing websites, and thesedays, there are a lot of competing sites. Increasing your ranking means promoting your site, and that takes time, and/or money. How would you feel, if after years of effort, blogger, wordpress, or your free hosing account provider, decided to delete your site, or sell to a rival, or suddely display their adverts on your site?

It happens, and even if it doesn’t, you’ll always be worried that it could. Imagine that your site had become successful, and was earning you $100 a day. How would you feel if it disappeared, even for a week? That’s why people buy their own hosting, and as it can cost as little as $5 a month, it’s really a no brainer.

Whichever route you choose, my last piece of advice is publish, then edit. Don’t try to get your site perfect, good enough will do. You can always improve, and add to your site later.

So, you’ve decided to build a website – now you have to choose the topic for your site. If you have offline expertise in a particular area, perhaps that’s where you’ll start. If you want to build a website to make money however, the topic, or niche that you choose will determine how much it is possible to make.

A profitable Niche should have the following features:

• A high number of daily searches online
• A high number of related long tail keyword
  searches
• Some keyword phrases with medium, low, or little competition
• Advertisers willing to pay for advertising space, and/or
• People searching for a solution to a problem, or problems, and willing to pay for it.

You’ll need to use some of the same keyword research tools that are used for Keyword Selection, in order to accurately select the niche or niches that you want to target. But here’s a starting point that is free.

Click here to go to the Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool. This will list the top 100 phrases that contain your selected keyword, listing them in order of the number of daily searches. Some keywords that you check out will not have 100 results, meaning that the niche does not have much depth. Others will list 100 keywords, and even number 100 will have a high number of searches, meaning that the niche has plenty of long tail keywords to choose from, and may have up to 1000 related keyphrases. (I have done keyword research on wordtracker that produced a list of 13,000 keywords)

I’ve entered the keyphrase “selling websites” – maybe you have some old websites that you would like to turn into cash, or you want to build a site to advertise websites that you build and flip for cash. The results will vary slightly (sometimes a lot with seasonal keywords like halloween, or Christmas) but I find only 14 keyphrases listed with total daily searches of 84. Perhaps you’d like to target the keyphrase “buying and selling websites” which gets 3 searches a day? I know I wouldn’t.

Lets try another phrase – Bass Fishing

You’ll find that there are now 5265 searches, and keyword number 100 has 19 searches daily. Clearly Bass Fishing is a niche that merits further investigation, whilst Selling Websites does not.

Before moving on to in depth keyword research, I like to find out how much advertisers are willing to pay to appear on Google Adwords. You can do this the long way, or click here to find out about a tool which will quickly conduct keyword research for you, including Google Adwords Bids. Using this tool, I find that there are around 500 clicks a day on “bass fishing” and that the advertisers pay around 90c per click. I also find there there is higher income potential for the keyword phrase “florida bass fishing” at around  $2.70 per click.

Critical to the success of your website is adding good content. After selecting your niche and identifying keywords to target, the process of adding content to your website begins. Website content has two functions:

1. To provide useful information to your website visitors
2. To provide the search engines with information that THEY want to rank highly for a number of keyphrases. This forms part of your “on page search engine optimisation”.

Writing website content is the most time consuming and crucial task that you face as a webmaster. Many people try to take shortcuts here by using Private Label Rights (PLR) content, or by using cheap outsourcing. In my experience, both of these methods produce poor results.

You can get a free 41 page pdf case study, detailing how to produce quality website content, including real figures from real sites by clicking here (opens pdf in a new window).

To get details of the course itself click here

XSitePro Website Building Software

I’ve been using XSitePro since September 2005 – it was made for me. As soon as I saw it advertised, I bought it, and I have not been disappointed. For me, it is one of the best value products that I have ever bought.

If you happen to be reading this in January/February 2009, come back and visit this site often. You’ll be witnessing a website being built, and evolving live, using XSP software.

Some people prefer to assemble all of their content, then publish it. I prefer to get something up, online, live, and then improve it from there. This process has been described as “ready, fire, aim”.

Version 2 of the software has recently been released recently, and many of the limitations and problems/bugs that this version has will have been removed, so if you are reading this after the new version is available, hopefully, much of my criticism will not apply. In any case, I’ll be reviewing the new version here soon.

If you buy the current software, you’ll get an upgrade to version 2 for free. To get more information click here

What’s good about XSP?

• You don’t have to learn html code
• It has in built website templates
• Extremely comprehensive instruction manual
• Step by Step video instruction
• Very active user forum
• Easy learning curve (compared to other web site building software)

What’s not so good?

• Some of the included templates are pretty naff (but you can easily design your own simple templates, and I’ll show you how)
• Sometimes text or images will not line up correctly (but if you understand html, this is easily sorted out)
• XSP lacks a directory structure, which isn’t great for SEO purposes
• The links page really needs to be a links directory with categories

Ratings:

Customisation Options: 5.5/10

Ease of Use: 8/10

User Forum: 9/10

Support: 9/10

Software Updates: 7/10

Documentation / Tutorials: 8.5/10

Website Quality: 7/10

Value for Money: 10/10

I just found the Weebly software and I’m listing as many free website building software platforms as I
can find.

The Weebly homepage boasts that you can create blogs and websites, so I completed the brief sign up and …

Selected a Website Title, then …

Chose a header, then …

Using the drag and drop functionality, dragged a title bar into the page, and inserted a title then …

Inserted a paragraph of text …

Dropped in an image, with a line of text alongside …

Pulled in my seven seconds of fame from youtube …

Dropped in a Google map for the location of the climb …

Then added a contact form and published the site (page) to the web

You can see the result here – http://climbing.weebly.com

Yep, I know some of the elements are out of line, but it’s not bad from a standing start in 10 minutes. Try
it out yourself