STEP 6: DEFINE YOUR MARKET SEGMENT

Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience.

For example, you may have a "clothing business" where you "sell clothing." While those phrases describe what you do, they are not necessarily the words that your audience would enter into a search engine to find you. How many times have you went to Google and typed in "sell clothing" in order to find a particular shirt or hat?

Therefore, you must change your point of view from the person selling the product to the person that wants to buy your product. For example, popular phrases to target in the clothing category would be "plus size clothing," "men’s clothing," or "women’s clothing.". It's next to impossible to simply guess what the most popular phrases will be.

While "men’s clothing" in the previous example may be one of the most popular clothing related searches, it unfortunately has a lot of competition. In addition, you will normally find visitors who search on very broad keyword categories purchasing less often than someone who knows exactly what they want. A good example of such a niche phrase would be "custom baseball hats." The benefit of "custom baseball hats" is that it's both a popular search phrase and it only has about 2000 pages on Google competing against it. That's much less competitive than the 1 million results returned for "men’s clothing."

WordTracker calls the popularity and competition ratio the "KEI" or Keyword Effectiveness Index. The higher the KEI, the more effective the keyword will be for you.

Therefore, targeting relatively popular segment keywords has the following four advantages:

1. Keywords produce a nice flow of traffic if you're careful to pick ones that still have good popularity.

2. Segmented keywords will significantly increase your chance of success. Achieving a top ranking will be much easier with a niche keyword phrase versus a very broad, highly popular phrase. No top ranking can be guaranteed in an organic search engine like Google. There are simply too many variables. Therefore, you'll greatly increase your chances of success by choosing less competitive keyword phrases.

3. Segmented keywords will save you time. While you could use various tools and research to achieve a top ranking for "men’s clothing," the time required to do so may not be worthwhile. Let your competitor waste their efforts on the ultra-competitive phrases. In the same amount of time they spend trying to achieve a single top ranking for your industry's most popular phrase; you could achieve top rankings on twenty other phrases.

4. Segmented keywords yield more sales per visitor. That's because these keywords are more targeted. Therefore, these prospects have a better idea of what they want. If they find it on your site at the right price, then your chances for a sale are much greater.

Go though you list of competitors and complimentary services choosing the ones that you feel are most related to your product. Remember: Choose only relevant keywords.

The phrases you target must be relevant to what you have to sell. It must also be applicable to what you have to offer on the specific Web page you are optimizing. How many times have you searched Google, landed on a page, and then backed out within 5 seconds of arriving? That page had a top ranking, but it did not have what you were looking for.

If you target a keyword or phrase, then the page they land on must offer the products, services or content that they expect.

The page should offer direct links to other potential products and services they may expect to find to compliment the page offering.

How do you know what people are looking for on your pages? DotNetNuke provides an excellent tool for getting this information. Simply go to the admin tab; select site log, choose a Site Referral Report scan the list and you will find the search engine and search term used to find your site.

You can also see which keywords and phrases are driving the highest conversion and revenue, to ensure you maximize the return from your SEO effort. Once you identify these pages and search phrases, make sure you add them to the top of your list.

3.Search brand names in Google's Sandbox. This will return additional keywords that searchers entered when using the brand name. You can also enter regular keyword phrases and get related keyword phrases that have been searched on Google.

3.Search for brand names then go to the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. Enter in a keyword and Overture returns all the prior month's searches that include your phrase

Use abbreviations and misspellings. A good misspelling tool is Search Spell. Search Spell uses actual misspellings entered into the search engines.

When you have completed going through your keyword lists transfer the top 50 choices you have made to your projects working list.

In the next step we will use Google ad word pay per click features to select our optimal list of keywords and phrases to start optimizing your DotNetNuke Portal.