The power of well optimized content pages - niche markets

When I put up my new site one of the things that was redone was the section on Our Coffee Customers. First thing we did was put it in a subdirectory called "restaurant". The reason for this was when we looked at what people had searched for to find our customers alot of the time "restaurant: was one of the keywords used. If people had not used that extra keyword or had a more random keyword I would have put these pages in the main directory. But this worked out and it keeps things nice and clean on the web site.

So adding to our base "restaurant" keyword was also obvoiusly the name of the restaurant in the URL, page title, and H1 tags. Again this was mostly done searching to find out what keywords were most used to find the majority of the restaurants listed, and then finding a uniform way of presenting those keywords.

Another thing I did was for the page description I it is "We are proud that Bymark Restaurant in Toronto has chosen Bean Coffee Shop to be their coffee supplier." It is also the first line of text on the main body of the page. This was done so that is what will show up first in the SE's. Some SE's will show the description starting with the keyword which is the reason "Bymark" shows up before our company name. "Toronto was also placed there as a minor keyword search just for those searchers that wanted to narrow their results.

The end result is a fully optimized section that is not only relevent to potential customers but also for the SE's. The results are best shown on MSN (Google is liking the site a bit better but still not happy). For the keywords;

Terra Restaurant #15
Presidential Gourmet #4
Bymark #4
Allens Restaurant #4
North 44 Restaurant #6
Acqua Restaurant #16
Sassafraz #1

Those results are pretty good and will get noticed. The results so far on this have been positive an this section of our web site has resulted in about 24% of the keyword searches that people have used to find our site.

The reason this is good for the site is that most of these restaurants are not only known in Toronto but also internationally. They are known by their reputation for 5 star restaurants with the price tags to match. If someone is searching for them on the internet they have either visited the restaurant and know how good quality their food is or they can't afford to eat there and just look at the pretty pics of it (I fall into the later group). Either way the association that is made between our company and the restaurant in the consumers mind tells them that our coffee "must" be of good quality if we are their supplier.

These web surfers were probably looking for the restaurants web site at the time of their search and they can get to it from each page. They might not purchase our coffee right away, maybe never, maybe they don't drink coffee. Who knows, but the seed has been planted and they did leave our site with at least 1 piece of knowledge, and that is "we supply the coffee at the high end restaurant that they were surfing for".

Also looking at our stat files I see that over 10% of the visitors to our site bookmark the site. To me that sounds really good. This is all about having people find your site and also finding a new potential market.

For other web site owners you can do the same. Say you own an Online Gift Store and support Team Burt in the 50km Annual Pub Race. An optimized page on your site might bring in some traffic to your site. Not people looking for gifts, but people looking to find out about the race. Your association with that might not mean much to the surfer at the time but if that race is dear to their haeat then when they are looking for a product you sell they might come back to your shop and purchase it just because of your association with the event. They will already have a postive image of your company and you have a potential customer that might have never found your site through your usual marketing means.

Some people just get under your skin

The other day some idiot posted in Harald's blog and made a rather derogatory comment obviously about Bobby. This person had 1 previous post and had contributed nothing /nada /zip /zero to osC but felt they were in a position to make such comments about a person with 36 contributions and 5000+ posts (est as his account is no longer there). This person really pissed me off so I posted a response and made my usual little jab (after rewriting what I had originally posted) but the guy got on my nerves, so I did what I would normally do .... post again. :)


From this persons 1 post he writes;

I don't suppose the development team find comments like that particularly motivating at all.

Your trash talk about a person who was a very active member of the forum really does not motivate people to 'help' others if their reward for helping is getting stupid comments from people like you.

And again;

I'm not involved in any coding projects myself - primarily because my coding sucks bigstyle

Then don't comment on others who actually 'can' code.

And once again;

on behalf of the silent masses who don't participate in the forums but think osComemrce is a fantastic stuff... big thanks to hpdl & the team. We really do appreciate your efforts.

What about the efforts of the people who post contributions and who freely offer their time to help others, all of which you have done none of.

Just want to end this by say to Alex Gener (because this is MY blog and I can say what I want here) .... shut the f#@k up, you are an idiot.

If you have ever had the pleasure of getting Bobby on messenger when you have had a problem it is where his abilities as a coder really shine. While I was still trying to type (with 1 finger) out what my problem was in little parts he had already pulled up the page from osC and recoded it and sent it to me, and of course it worked like a charm. I think Bobby codes at about 100 words a minute and types even faster. I was in awe at his abilities, truely amazing.

To Harald, the team, and ALL member of the osC forum,

Thanks for being understanding Harald, and once again sorry for hijacking your blog. I will try and be nicer in the future, and not mention that name that gets the same response as saying "MacBeth" in a theater. I appreciate everything that osC (the team) has done to help me get my store going, and I also appreciate the efforts of the people who are members of the forum who have helped me or tried to, your time is valuable and your efforts are truely appreciated. Thanks to all of you.

Goggle update, links and content

Well if seems Google has finally done their update and my new site has a PR 3 as well as some of the product pages got a PR 3 also. Although I am still really no where to be found on Google at least I have a PR now which I guess means that they are somewhat liking my site. Obviously more work needs to be done. MSN is really liking the site (#1 or #2 for most keywords) and Yahoo is fairly good also.

Links, links and more links. I also purchased yesterday SEO Elite software. I still have to learn how most of it works but it has already been quite good. I have been playing around seeing who is linking to my customers and a few of my competitors and have found some good links to add my site to, mostly to directories that I never new existed that they were on and I was not. As I read more about the software and how to use it properly I will keep this updated. I don't think it does to much that you can't do on your own but it certainly makes it alot easier.

One thing I find amazing is how many links you get back by having a DMOZ listing, the directory is reprinted in so many other sites it creates a lot of links (some with good PR's, others not).

One thing I have noticed is that all my links go back to my main page, I am going to have to start spreading those around and get some for my product pages and also for the customers pages.

Another project for me is to redo the content on the site and get a copy of Burt's PLR Manna software, I hope he saves a copy for me. There is so much information about coffee on the internet I could easily come up with 500 pages but it has to be unique content. I am looking at this for a summer project for my long weekends at the cottage with my laptop. On a personal note I am sad that Burt is taking a break from blogging as I always enjoy reading his updates. As long as he is happy with life and work, that is the most important part.