SEO And SEM For Niche Markets On No Budget

By Ty Fawcett

I work in Search Engine Marketing, so I am used to working for clients in very competitive markets after "high dollar" terms. One term has over 2,910,000 results when searched in Google, so as you can imagine it takes a lot of work and effort on every ones part (including the site owner) to help achieve that goal.

How-ever I recently decided "I should do this for my airsoft club", and in my head I had a fairly good plan worked out on how to go about this. I have very little money for the project, and no money for marketing other then what-ever I could do in my free time. When it came time to do this I found there was very little in the way of resources for that market to get the word out about my website. I just entered a market, with no-were to market. So how do you get the word out?

At this point four months ago most marketing comes across a web forum we have setup for quite a few years, it does it's job, but is not very search engine friendly. Google cannot index pages due to its dynamic URL's, and no matter how many links I seem to point to it I just couldn't get it to work without decent forum software and admin access. For the cost/effort put into it, it works fairly well at attracting people who already essentially "know" about your market, how-ever it just was not getting the job done as far as potential new players (customers for you business owners) finding us.

The next step was building a website, that was a major task in itself. The programming and designing should be left up to the professionals, as anything I mocked up myself always seemed to be "sub-par" at best. Your website should be search engine friendly, with static pages organized in a sensible clean manner. Obviously not too much flash (just pictures), no javascript or frames or anything else shady. Don't go heavy with the pictures, keep your home pages load time fast as web users are very impatient!

People must be able to use it in order for your site to be successful, and with Google analytics and webmaster tools over time you can track exactly what needs to be tweaked for better results. These tools will not pay off at first, but in the long run it will give you the best understanding of your sites strengths and weakness's and were you can improve. With the new bench marking tools in beta, it will be extremely helpful being able to compare your site to competitors sites!

Blog if there is any in your niche market, even better would be adding one to your site and participating in others blogs constructively to build a good reputation among others in your niche market. Basically do not be spammy, and most of all be respectful. Do not forget to do some social networking, and never just promote yourself either!

The content writing is hard, but can always be tweaked over time or added to. I am not a good writer, and I found this part to be quite hard at first and definitely the most intimidating. This took me a lot longer then I thought, with quite a few revisions to the content. The best content is written for humans, so do not be afraid to inter-link to yourself under the appropriate titles for the pages you want to promote or that is relevant to that topic page (especially on the home page). Keep adding to your content, with new pages to keep enticing visitors (and search engine spiders) to visit your site, and most importantly build links to any new content you write.

One of the most important tools I have used in my marketing has been photos and videos. With sites like youtube, its easy to upload a video to promote your products on in my case my club. In niche markets you can use these to fill the search engines with videos with tags of your relevant keywords, and you can easily load them onto the website for extra content for users who have found your site. They do not take up bandwidth, and load fairly quickly. I also use imageshack.us for my photo hosting, making high resolution thumb nail pictures, this is great for on the forums and on the website. Also social networking on these sites and others like my space or facebook can be well worth the effort.

It should be noted that you do not get any SEO value really from Youtube or imageshack.us, you just generate traffic and interest in something that the people are already searching for. If they can find a video on Youtube about it, they maybe more interested in buying your product (or in my case joining the club), because if its tagged right and is relevant they will find it in the search engines!

Over-all in one day of my site being live I was cached, within 2 I was in the #2 spot for my main keywords. Hard work plus time and effort and a little common sense with the search engines can go a long way in helping raise your profile in your niche market.

Ty Fawcett, the webmaster for Vancouver Island Airsoft and Central Island Airsoft, between the two he has little time to do anything else!

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