Let's face it. The internet is BIG ! Creating a brand new site and filling it with high quality content, great products or offering awesome services is comparatively easy when it comes to getting your site noticed. Here are a few tips you can use to help your site stand out in the crowd, of course they all take time and effort to do correctly. After all, nothing is truly free.

Give your website a solid foundation

Getting noticed.

Do your homework!

What terms to focus one.

Let's say your site sells camping equipment. Lets use Google trends to to research that term.. Visit http://www.google.com/trends and enter "camping equipment" First you'll likely notice this is a seasonal term, it peaks roughly in the middle of every year. Keep that in mind. While it is a good term if you are in that business, December and January are certain to be slow months for you unless you also target some more "timeless" terms.

So what are some other terms for "camping equipment" ? Camping gear comes to mind. How does that compare ? Enter both terms, separated by a comma "camping equipment, camping gear" You'll see "camping gear" is used a bit less than "equipment" but still gets quite a few searches. Lets try adding a third term "camping supplies" , again, we'll just seperate the terms with a comma "camping equipment, camping gear, camping supplies". Ok, so it's even a bit less popular than camping gear was, but combined, these two terms outperform the most popular term. They are the uppermost low hanging fruit, albeit rather generalized, they can form the basis of your site's foundation. So what else does your site offer?

Another handy tool for keyword research can be found at http://www.spyfu.com SpyFu has a bit different perspective, but reports similar trends like Google trends does. It also shows a lot of information regarding how fiercely the keyword term is competed for. Remember the big boys have you out gunned when it comes to advertising dollars. You might be able to steal some of their traffic for a short time with a large enough advertising budget, but presumably you'd like to spend as little as possible and have a sustainable business model, so again..reach for the low hanging fruit.

The main indicator of how coveted a keyword is how much advertisers are willing to pay for a click. Entering the the term "whitewater" into SpyFu, I see they've shelled out anywhere from $0.80 to $3.17 Wow! They've apparently found the term "whitewater" is a pretty good term and has a high likelihood of generating a sale. Darn, whitewater, although not a highly used search term is just too coveted. We wont remove it from our list, but we should certainly look for alternatives that are not so expensive to compete against. How about "cookout" Ok, this is a bit more in the ballpark. Advertisers paid $0.34 to $0.81 per click on that keyword. Obviously it is a decent converting keyword, else the bids would be even lower, but seeing the top amount below a dollar tells me, some of that traffic is obtainable.

With these two tools, you should be able to come up with 8 to 12 terms that..
Generate enough searches
Collectively are consistently searched on regardless of season.
Are not so fiercely competed on that you could never obtain the top position in the search engines.

The next step, sprinkling your keywords about and throughout your site, but I'm afraid that'll have to wait. It's a beautiful day for a trip to the river,

Regards,
Dewed

ps. If you stubmled across this article actually looking for camping gear or whitewater rafting supplies, check out River Connection, they've got some great stuff!