Animated Marketing

How Niche Sites are best for Google SEO

January 18, 2010

photo by Danard Vicente

Instead of me jumping in and giving all sorts of basic SEO Tips and stuff you can find anywhere, I want to give you some updated information on a technique to achieve better Google rankings. This is a technique that you should consider before ever rolling out your website, but you can apply it to an existing website as well.

Back in the old days, you could obtain backlinks in many different ways. As long as you had the most backlinks from high PR sites, and the anchor text was relevant, you could achieve #1 rankings.

But the game has changed drastically. No longer can you just get a site ranked by having the biggest pocketbook. Google has put all it’s PHDs to work and has the most relevant search results thanks to their hard work.

Imagine that your website is a shopping mall. Google walks up to your website then walks through the front door and starts having a look around. It sees that there are several different stores. Google sees the following: Abercrombie and Fitch, Macy’s, Black & Decker, Bath & Body, General Nutrition Center and JcPenney.

So at first glance, your website sells silk scarves, vitamins, tools, t-shirts and scented body wash.

Google takes a few snapshots of your stores, and then leaves. So, if your goal was for Google to see you as an online shopping mall, then you have achieved your goal. But with so many different types of products, will you actually rank well for any specific products? Probably not. At least not without pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into your eBiz.

Ok, let’s go back and say you only sell Tools. So Google walks through and gets a good idea that you sell all kinds of tools. This is great, but can you possibly compete with all the tools stores online? I think not.

If you want good Google rankings fast on a new site, then you must make your new site as Niche market as possible. This means that it is centered around one theme.

Tools is way too broad. Power tools is still too broad. Antique tools is a more niche term. If you build a site that sells Antique tools, then each one of your categories would lead to some page that offers products relating to a specific type of antique tool.

Since your site focuses on Antique tools only, you would have a better chance competing against some of the older websites out there, and Google would recognize that your site is all about Antique tools.

Along with the basic SEO principles, Google will reward those searching specifically for Antique/Old tools with your site, that specializes in nothing but Antique tools.

Besides just having product pages, you can add original content on informational pages about different types of antique tools. This type of information is relevant to your product and can also be a great way to build ‘linkbait’ pages. Linkbait is any page that users link to voluntarily from their sites, just because they like the information on the page. This type of link is excellent, because you do not have to do anything to obtain the one-way link. A link to a subpage within your site is called Deep linking, and can be very beneficial to your SE rankings as well.

Since Google has the ability to determine the theme of a site just by looking at the whole site as one snapshot, it is now ever more important to make sure that all the content on your site is relevant to your theme. A niche website would have a more specific theme sitewide, and would give you, the webmaster, a better chance to succeed in your quest for top organic search rankings.