Posted on February 17th, 2010When people first start to create a web site, they base it on a general niche that they may already know about. For example if the person is into movies, they will talk about all of the different types of movies on their blog. They will create good, sticky content and they will update the site on a regular basis. Meanwhile as they do all of this, they are not able to gain any traction when it comes to the search engines. The highest that their web site ranks is on the 7th or 8th pages of different movie related search results. No matter how much they try, the results stay the same. The reason for this is because they are making the search engines think that their site is about movies in general. No matter how much new and interesting content you put on your site, there is just too much competition out there for such a broad niche. If you think about it, your competition consist of every newspaper and movie magazine that has a web site talking about movies. That is a lot of competition. This is why it is the best thing for you, that you make your niche more narrow. This will allow you to beat out the big boys and rank well in the search engines.
A popular way of making your niche more narrow is to use long tailed keywords. Long tailed keywords are when you use a phrase and not just a general word to help rank yourself on the search engines. To go back to our movie example in the previous paragraph, let’s say we stop trying to rank for the term “movies”. Instead we try to rank for “dark scientific movies”. This makes our niche a little bit more narrow. You will have people that search for that term being able to find your site. Even if you do not talk about scientific movies in every post, if you talk about enough, you will start to rank for that term.
Even though you may want a more general audience to visit your site, this will at least get people to visit the site in the first place. The other way of doing things, your site would never be found. Now people will be exposed to your site and either link to it or talk about it with their friends. Pretty soon you will have more than just Sci Fi fans coming to your web site. You will get a more broad audience and you will be able to expand your topics a little more.
Long tailed keywords can be the exact solution that you are looking for when you are trying to rank on the search engines. Instead of try to bulldoze your way over the big boys, try to go around them. Fight a battle that is more strategic. Your chances of success will be a lot better in the long run.