Small Business Web Site Design - Laying the Foundation of Success De-mystified - Part 3

The previous publication considered the commencement process of using primary client documentation to extract potential keywords and define the niche market. These two aspects will now be considered in more detail.

What is a Niche?
• Wikipedia defines a niche as - A Niche market is a focused, targetable (sub-set) of a market.
• Finding the right niche market then implies that you have to identify your audience within that larger
market, which means narrowing down your customer you want to target.
• Know your customer:
• This is particularly important for brick and mortar businesses who wish to expand the business horizon.

Keyword research is more about understanding the target customers than it is about finding the right words. After all the ultimate goal of our web site is to connect with your customer, and you will only be able to do that if you understand the target customers make-up and problems they want solved.

Identify the "right keywords" to attract targeted site visitors. Deciding which keywords your website should target is undeniably the most important decision in the process of establishing and promoting a web design. It would be an understatement of fact to say that it is the bedrock of web site success.

This entails research of the niche and target market. Research implies an understanding of your market you desire to operate in. What phrases or words the target market audience enters to find the information they are looking for or problem they need addressed. Research further involves considering the economic viability of a choosing keyword.

When a chosen key-word or phrase yields a return of 15 or 75 searches, you may be on the wrong track or on the right track, if you are targeting an exact match for high value services like say a cosmetic surgeon. Niche research has to include analyzing the competition. How competitive is your chosen keyword. No web site has a permanent place in ranking in the search engines. To stick to a highly competitive keyword may simply mean a longer process of promotion using all the available techniques and services listed below, nothing that cannot be accomplished thru time and a modicum of financial investment. Many sophisticated software tools are available to assist with and make this process easier.

This article cannot begin to do justice to the importance of finding the niche, and may in most cases require more sophisticated tools and techniques to finding the right niche. There are a host of free tools available to do some basic research and help point you in the right directions. Google Keyword Suggestion Tool and aDCenter Labs Keyword Forecast are very useful tools. Web Designer will invariable glean valuable insight from your information and should be able to come up with a selection of potential key words and phrases for your Small Business Web Site Design that will require further mining and distillation.

Unless you want to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars every month on PPC to promote your site, do not underestimate the importance of finding the niche and knowing the competition. The follow-up publication will focus on factors relating to the actual construction phase of web page design.