Fundamentals of SEO Lesson 3: Pond Size
You need to choose whether to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a large pond. The choice may be out of your hands. If you are optimizing a site for an existing business in a competitive market, you may well be in a large pond but there still are measures you can take to maximise your search ranking even against very tough competition. Let’s look at reducing the size of the pond first.
SEO Lessons Harry Potter Google Results
Reducing the size of the pond is a metaphor for reducing the competition. Take “Harry Potter” as an example. If you have a Harry Potter website or blog, you might want to focus efforts on making all or most your content as relevant as possible to people that type “Harry Potter” into a search engine. Try it. Type “Harry Potter” into Google and see how many pages are found.
Nearly 60 million. That is the size of your pond. It would be a mammoth task to get people’s attention in a pond that big. You’re a needle in a haystack and (unless you pay for traffic through ads) no one will find you.
But not everyone searches for “Harry Potter”. If you are more specific, you’ll reduce the size of the pond. Type “Harry Potter Movies” into google. The pond is smaller, about half the size, but still big. Trying “Harry Potter Movies Cast” (without the speech marks) gives a pond size of about 4 million. The more specific, the more obscure, the more “niche” you get, the more your pond size reduces. The smaller the pond, the more likely you are to be noticed. Of course if you get too specific. Try “Harry Potter Movie Music Tabulature for Irish Tenor banjo”
OK, so now we know how to reduce the size of the pond in order to make it feasible that your site will be found, what about your fish size? This is a metaphor for the power you have relative to your competitors. And this is where the hard work begins. To gain strenght in you market you need to build up some muscle – muscle in terms of quality content that is focused on being relevant to your niche and quality links to your pages.
The SEO Lesson
If your Website is too general there is likely to be lots of competition. Become a specialist. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because thousands of people search on “Harry Potter” every day that you will get a share of it. For every search for “Harry Potter” there are millions of pages competing to deliver content. Instead, increase your chances of succes by concentrating on a niche with an acceptable level of competition.. Then, build up muscle in your market place by developing quality content and links. In a small pond, even a moderate amount of muscle will get you to the top.
But what is an acceptable level of competition and how do you know when your niche is so specific that there is nobody interesed? That’s the subject of Fundamentals Lesson 5 and before that we need to understand Keywords.
Next Fundamentals of SEO Lesson is Lesson 4: Keywords
