Are You Playing Hide and Seek With Your Market?

Don't Hide From Your Market! - Photo Credit PRactical Ramblings

Many seem to be following the “if you build it they will come” business plan.

That simply does not work.

Most of your market is trying to find you by searching somewhere – whether that is on a search engine, blog search, on their favorite Social Networking sites, using search tools like FeelTipTop or in Local Search Directories.

The key questions you must answer when building traffic for your Web site are:

1. WHO is YOUR target audience
2. What exact words and phrases (your anchor text) are they using when looking for what you offer

The very first thing every business, blog, or ecommerce site needs to know is what their most important keyword phrases are – because how you write about and promote those phrases determines whether your Web site gets found online and by how many.

Make this task your highest priority today.

1. First identify your target audience – who would look for what you offer and where do they look?
2. Brainstorm – ideally with others – how your target audience would go about searching for you online.
3. What exact words and phrases would they use? Remember that many will NOT know your industry jargon or the specific names you use.
4. Still stuck? Read these Branding Tips to trigger more ideas for how to determine who your target audience is.
5. Check your existing positions for those phrases (see tools below). Your target is to be found on the first page of results at Google, Yahoo and Bing.
6. Identify your very best page or post for each phrase. If you don’t have a compelling pillar post for that phrase create one.

Here are some tools to assist you with the above:

FREE KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOLS:

• WordStream Free Keyword Research Tool – my preferred tool – makes it easy to edit and save keyword lists
• WordTracker (free version) – best for checking actual search volume
• Google Keyword Tool External US
• Google Keyword Tool External UK

There are many others but the first two are what I use most and the last two are what Murray Newlands recommends on his Affiliate Marketing Blog.

SEARCH ENGINE POSITION TOOLS:

• Free SEOBOOK Rank Checker – How to use Rank Checker to check your search engine positions.
• If you have the SEOBook Toolbar the RankChecker is built into it.

One you know what they are, use your most important keyword phrases:

1. To write posts that target specific keyword phrases
2. When leaving comments in blogs using KeywordLuv or that allow you to add links with your own anchor text within the body of comments
3. Share them with your blogging buddies, blogger alliance, blog club, or collaborators so they know precisely which posts are most important to you and what keyword phrase to use as your preferred anchor text
4. Focus on them when doing blog outreach

If each of us will take the time to share this type of information with our collaborators, it will make a HUGE difference in the results we will see and how fast we attain them. Once we have this information we can select the best anchor text and landing page to use whenever we link to each other. When I blog I also add Twitter IDs and I recommend doing that too.

In case anyone doesn’t know, anchor text is simply the words that are used in hyperlinks you create. Instead of always using someone’s blog name or their name start LINKING their optimum anchor text phrases because your target audience includes the masses who don’t know your business name or blog yet.

OTHER WAYS TO BUILD TRAFFIC:

• NEW: 101 Essential Traffic Building Resources
• List your business in Local Search Directories
• 27 Ways to Seek Out Customers

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• SEO Tips, Directing Increased Hits to Your Website (ronmedlin.com)
• Tracking Blog Traffic (dickstersrandomthoughts.blogspot.com)

Tagged as: building traffic