It set me thinking about the challenge of helping you, my reader, to understand all this technology that I talk about in small business website design. I try to position all my writing at the non-technical person, but even so, I get a fair number of people who find that my explanations are pitched at the wrong level.

Some people want it more technical and complain if I’m not quoting HTML syntax or talking about the latest super-tweak on SEO.

Others find any kind of technology completely confusing and if I start to talk about anything involving a website source file or a link or a cookie then they start panicking and get confused.

This is a fun challenge! The trick with explaining any kind of technology is that you need to start from a basic level of understanding and build on top of that. If you don’t have the basic level nailed down then this is where things start to get a bit difficult.

It’s fine if you’re talking to one person because you can have a chat first and find out which level to start from. It gets harder if you’re talking to a group of people. You can still discuss their knowledge level but the levels may be different so you’ve then got to help all of them together to understand your techie talk. It gets harder again if you’re writing for readers who you can’t engage with directly.

The good news is that by choosing a target audience who is non-technical, I’ve narrowed down my niche so that I stand a better chance of writing stuff that you’ll be able to use. I’m making the assumption that small business owners are a clever bunch, but that they probably don’t speak native CSS or PHP. I always make the promise that I’ll leave the white coat by the door! That’s far easier than trying to write techie stuff that works for everyone.

I encourage you to contact me by leaving a blog comment, or chatting on Facebook or Twitter, to let me know if you find that my stuff is hitting the right level for you.

PS. I’m about to start a 4 week road trip so apologies in advance if it seems like I’m ignoring your nice feedback

To recap, a great keyword must be:

1. Laser-targeted to your chosen niche

Have you heard? General keywords are out and ultra-focused long-tail combinations are in. I’m thinking here about the difference between ‘Gordon Ramsay’ and ‘Gordon Ramsay hamburger recipe’. Focused keywords help you to zero in on your niche and to write content that searchers are really looking for.

If you go for general terms, you’ll find it hard to compete and get your website seen on search engines. You’ll also risk writing content that’s too general for your visitors.

2. Highly relevant to the page that you are optimizing

Keyword relevance is vital and the closer to your subject area the better. Going back to Gordon for a second, there’s no point going for the hamburger keyword if your page is about the latest repeat of Kitchen Nightmares. Yes, they are related, but your average web visitor only gives you a nanosecond to show them exactly what they are looking for.

3. Something that lots of people are searching for

The first two points will be wasted if you don’t have a decent search volume of people looking for your chosen keyword. It’s easy to find long-tail keyword combinations, but you need to know there’s someone out there looking for them. You can use online tools such as Wordtracker or AdWords to check out search volumes for your keyword shortlist.

4. A term that has very, very low SEO competition

Once you have 1 to 3 nailed down, you’re probably well on the way, but you need to check how much competition you have. Long tail keywords mostly have lower competition than general terms (not always) but you need to verify this.

It’s OK to measure how many competing sites you have using a simple Google search, but that doesn’t tell you the whole picture. Google will return everything that seems relevant and that includes all the different combinations and extensions of your keyword. If you’re going to do this properly, you need to see whether the other sites have been optimized for search. What does this mean? I’m talking about titles, tags, text and links – standard SEO stuff.

So hopefully I’ve convinced you that these rules are important.

Do your keywords pass the test?

A good keyword has to be:

1. Laser-targeted to your chosen niche

2. Highly relevant to the page that you are optimizing

3. Something that lots of people are searching for

4. A term that has very, very low SEO competition

If you can get all of these right, you’ll succeed in the search engines. Another way to put this is that if your keyword doesn’t seem so good for any one of these points, it’s unlikely you’ll be successful.

I’m making a bold assumption here of course (it’s Friday after all). I’m guessing you don’t have a major website with a huge presence like Apple or Google and that you don’t have 10,000 backlinks and a PageRank of 7. Am I right? If you are one of these sites then well done! You can probably let go on a few of the points listed above.

If you’re one of us little guys then read on.

My Four Points listed above might sound a little bit harsh. Why shouldn’t you be able to compete on a nice, simple keyword like iPhone or Gordon Ramsay or 24? A direct answer would be “OK. Have a go then”. I’ll see you in 6 months after you’ve spent all your time collecting links, tweaking pages and checking your Google position.

The point is, you can’t win on these highly popular keywords. There’s too much competition out there. Too many other websites and too many relevant backlinks to these sites. You’ll blow your entire marketing budget and still not get the search traffic that you deserve.

The better approach is to find a niche that you can dominate and build from there. Follow the keyword rules above and you’ll get site that appears high in the search rankings for relevant, good volume keywords. This will help to grab the visitors.

Next time we’ll go into some more detail on why the four points are important, what happens if you don’t follow them and some handy tips to check how you’re doing on each point.

One of my subscribers asked me about this today. If you know me then you won’t be surprised to hear that I had a simple answer:

1. Get the right niche/keywords
2. Write superb content using these keywords

… and then (only then)…

3. Get started on the SEO tweaks

How can it be this simple? Well, it’s not really. Working out the answers to number 1 and number 2 can be pretty hard. It can take a while to get these right, and you should spend time perfecting them.

My point is that if you get the first 2 parts right, then they can have such a huge effect on your search traffic, any SEO tweaks that you make are not going to make much difference.

The other way to look at this is that if you’ve got the wrong keywords and/or your content is poor, there’s not much point spending a huge amount of time on SEO.

Don’t get wrong though. SEO tweaks are important, and they can help you to get that vital edge over your competition.

So don’t ignore number 3!!

Sounds like one of those cheesy internet marketing ads doesn’t it?

I’m happy to say that this is real though. It’s happened to 3 of my lenses on Squidoo. Oh, and I now have a few PR3 lenses too, so it’s not just a one-off. You can check them all out via my Squidoo lensmaster page

OK. Enough bragging. Why is this good and why should you care about it and how can you do the same?

If you’ve never heard of Squidoo here’s the five second introduction: you get to build a lens (= a page) on any subject you like. Free. You tag it and promote it within Squidoo and it gets rated with a LensRank score. Successful lenses get the benefits of lots of focused traffic and high Google PageRank.

There’s also a Top 100 list. My CSS Background lens is #74 today, so it gets lots of exposure and traffic (another reason to brag by the way. Sorry. I’ll stop now. )

So you should care about this because it can get you a lot of targeted traffic. Targeted traffic equals focused visitors which you stand a great chance of converting to real customers.

You also get a share of Squidoo’s high Google PageRank. The ‘link juice’ flows from the Squidoo site (it has PR8 today) and down into the successful lenses. A high PageRank gets you a high position in Google’s search results and therefore a greater number of organic search visitors.

Things have definitely improved since my first attempts on Squidoo

In short, it’s all good. Now how can you do it?

1. Choose a good niche with decent traffic and low competition. Define some keywords.
2. Try to choose a subject that’s interesting to people who hang around Squidoo
3. Create a high quality lens, full of interesting content, good layout and some nice pictures
4. Choose your Squidoo tags carefully to match your chosen keywords
5. Get promoting!!

Sound easy? I reckon you can do it too. The real trick here is to build something that’s useful, interesting and the highest quality you can make it. Why not have a go?

If you’re thinking of looking into long tail searches (eg vacation rentals) for your site, where do you go to find them? These are the odd combinations of keywords that Googlers look for such as “vacation rental with extra barbeque”. They give you insight into what people are looking for.

There are some great resources for this, such as the free version of Wordtracker or Google Suggest. Just type in your basic keyword (vacation rentals here) and you’ll get a list of combinations. The many long combinations at the end are the long tail.

The problem with this idea is that you get a public list. It’s also a list of general searches, rather than something specific to your site.

It’s better to look at your own website visitors. What combinations are they looking for? Your analytics tool such as Google Analytics will tell you what keywords brought people to your site. That’s the big difference

This information is incredibly valuable and you can use it to find out what makes your site unique. I’ll bet there are some combinations in there that you never expected!!