You’ve probably heard that site speed is now one of the more than 200 factors that Google is using to rank search engine results. The reactions range from, “Everybody panic!” to “This will make it easier for the big sites to stomp the smaller ones,” to “Well it’s about time.” I actually don’t think that most smaller sites are going to suffer because of this change. Sure, the big guys can afford to have their sites hosted on faster, dedicated servers, but some of the worst sites when it comes to speed are sites of big cheeses, particularly those who sell expensive things. You can see in the screen shot the yawn-inducing graphic you have to sit through before you can actually do anything on one such site (a luxury watchmaker). If anything, it will be the sites that are electronic monuments to big egos that are going to suffer most. There are a lot of users like me who see that “Loading, please wait” widget as the perfect reason to click the “Back” button.

If you read Matt Cutts’ blog post for April 9, you’ll learn the reasoning behind Google’s decision, and why Cutts doesn’t think it’s going to be that big a deal. Here’s a recap.

Why Matt Cutts Doesn’t Think It’s Going to Be That Big a Deal

• Your site will depend much more on factors like reputation, relevance, and quality of content, and compared to these factors, site speed will be a relatively small factor in your ranking.
• Less than 1% of queries will change now that site speed is incorporated into the ranking algorithm. In terms of search results, there shouldn’t be a noticeable difference because the average SERP only shows about 10 results.
• Google actually launched this feature a few weeks ago and few people even noticed.
• Google has a whole mini-site dedicated to speeding up your site with plenty of resources and teaching videos about how to do it.
• Small sites are often quicker to respond to this kind of change on the theory that it’s easier to turn around a tugboat than the Titanic.
• And finally, most websites can be made faster with fairly simple fixes, which improves conversion rates and ROI.

Why Some People Say, ‘Oh Yes It Will Be’

Actually, a lot of the hand wringing over this is being done out of not precisely knowing things like how “site speed” is measured. Google isn’t terribly forthcoming about telling people how site speed is figured and weighted, so there are still questions surrounding this new ranking factor, such as:

• Is site speed the time it takes the entire page to load, or is site speed how much time per KB loaded? (Actually, code.google.com pushes their open source tool called Page Speed, which you’ll read more about below. Page Speed evaluates speed as page load time: the time elapsed between the time a user “requests” a page and the time the page is fully rendered by their web browser.)

• How will non-commercial, “passion”-based sites ever make it onto page 1 if they can’t afford a fast server or a web designer with mad skills?
• Will this give the big guys more stomping power since they can afford faster hosting and SEO services?
• Will overseas websites be penalized since their servers are in other parts of the world and may load slowly in the U.S.?
• Will this spell the end of small web hosting companies as sites rush to the big hosting companies with the fastest servers?
• Is this a form of “double jeopardy” where sites that already get less traffic and fewer back links due to their slowness are penalized more?
• Google Analytics code can measurably slow down load time – will webmasters be indirectly penalized for using Google Analytics?

What Should Webmasters Do?

Google wants you to speed up your site. They did some experiments where they deliberately slowed search results page loads to see how users would respond. They found out that slowing down a page by 100 to 400 milliseconds produces 0.2 to 0.6% fewer searches. Not only that, searches dropped even more over a period of weeks, and, even if the page loads returned to normal, it took users a couple of weeks to return to their normal search habits!

And sure, Google wants you to do lots of searches because the more you search, the more money they make. Therefore Google likes sites to load quickly so you won’t become frustrated and stop searching.

The first thing webmasters should do is to use some of the official tools for measuring site speed that Google offers. Go to Google’s Webmaster Central blog post on the topic of site speed (also see screen shot) and try out some of the speed measuring tools they suggest, including the Google-approved Firefox / Firebug add-on called Page Speed, the Yahoo! tool called YSlow, and WebPagetest to show your page’s load stats and generate a checklist for optimization. Google’s Webmaster Tools, under Labs, then Site Performance will show you how fast your website loads to users around the world.

Tips for Speeding Up Site:

Add a cache plugin to your site. It creates static versions of posts so that the pages don’t have to be recreated every time from scratch. Instead, an HTML file, perhaps with javascript for dynamic elements is displayed, which is faster for users. Other suggestions for speeding up your page, which you can read more about at code.google.com, include:

• Reducing size of responses, cached pages, and downloads (minimizing payload)
• Reducing upload size (minimizing request overhead)
• Reducing the number of serial request / response cycles (minimizing round-trip to the server times)
• Improving your layout (optimizing browser rendering)

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It seems we’re always hammering home the importance of link building, external links, and inbound links, and that sometimes makes us minimize the importance of the links available right there on your own pages. After all, you have complete control over the pages on your site, and if they have matured to where they have page rank, then that’s even better. There’s a lot you can do with respect to how your pages pass rank, which influences how search engines view the content on your pages.

SEO and high ranking for competitive terms actually has a lot to do with your internal link structure, though you might never know it for the choruses of “link building or die!” (which, yes, we’ve been guilty of as well). A new site that’s designed well, that’s themed and structured topically around a specific handful of keywords, has a better chance of rising to the top of the SERPs than an older site that doesn’t take this structure into account with respect to internal links, content, and naming conventions of filenames.

Optimizing Internal Linking

Since you have control over your internal pages, you might as well make the most of your on-site SEO opportunities. There’s a lot you can do to increase the relevance of all the pages on your site.

Start by making all your links absolute and getting rid of any secondary keywords that are irrelevant. As your pages mature, you want to make sure that they have names in the format of http://www.yourwebsite.com/pagename.html. That causes your pages to boost each other in the SERPs, and ensures that if your content is copied, the links will point back to your pages, giving you another back link (hooray!).

Put a limit on your outbound links at about 10. This helps you keep your pages focused. The fewer the outbound links, the more link juice the page has to transmit to its own keywords. This should be come evident when you start building external links and see how quickly the pages float to the top of the SERPs.

Optimize your anchor text by making sure your main keyword phrase shows up at least once on the page and in the title. If you assign each link wisely, you can nail down a handful of keywords that you want to show up exactly when people do searches. But don’t optimize any given page for more than three keywords. And if your page is getting much over 750 words, try to changing it into two pages with another keyword variation. This can get you double listed in the SERPs.

Keep in mind that contextual links inside your content should go high up on the page – above the fold if possible. Links that show up higher on the page carry more influence in search engines when compared with footer links. And if you’re using contextual links within your site, make sure you use the main keywords for the page that you want to rank with. In other words, make sure the anchor text on page x uses the keywords for page y that you want to rank for. This improves the quality of the internal back link with time, and in the meantime keeps your relevance high.

It’s ideal if you keep your Javascript and other programming code off the page in its own file, hyperlinked to the page. Cascading style sheets are the best because they separate content from images ind give the search engines what they’re hungry for without a bunch of excess. And, of course make sure your pages are laser focused. The main keyword should appear two to four times on the page, once in the h1 tag, with a variation on the keyword in the h2 tag.

Other Things to Consider

It’s also important to remember that keyword stuffing isn’t good. It’s one of those cases where less is more. Keep it to the basics of once in the title, again in the description, and a few times on the page. And once in your h1 tags.

You know how when you break a toe, the doctor will often “buddy tape” the broken toe to its neighbor to provide support as it heals? Well, You can buddy tape your pages by letting four or five of your highest ranking pages concentrate their link-mojo to your newest page, the one that may be slightly wobbly and needs to build up its strength. This is a good idea whenever you launch a new page.

Sometimes you need to do some housecleaning as well. Getting rid of off-topic pages and doing a 301 redirect to another page (or your home page) that’s been indexed. Some people will buy a new domain name made up mostly of your keywords, then redirect your old site to the new one. This is a little controversial, and can be painful in the short term, because it will take a few weeks for your rankings to get back up to where they were. However, the rankings should come back stronger in the long run, assuming you’ve done your due diligence with optimizing.

This is a sort of risky move, and if you’re put off by the idea, you could instead make sure you have a blog that’s listed in blog directories and start updating it regularly to increase how often the blog is crawled. This should eventually lift the tide for your whole site from all the spidering going on.

If you take care of these on-page optimization techniques, then think how powerful your off-page optimization will be!

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The great news is that web hosting is a very competitive market, and you have plenty of choices. There is stiff competition for the opportunity to host your website, so make sure that your needs are met. If one company doesn’t meet your needs, there are plenty of other fish in the sea. Here are the things you should consider and compare before signing on with a web hosting company.

The Big Four: Bandwidth, Disk Space, Reliability, Technical Support

When it comes to bandwidth, beware. There are web hosting services out there that promise you “unlimited bandwidth” when in reality, if you want to get picky about it, there’s no such thing. They may well indeed mean “more bandwidth than most websites could ever use,” but that’s still not the same as unlimited bandwidth. If you choose the less expensive shared web hosting, where your site shares a server with a bunch of other sites, be aware that their bandwidth usage could affect you. Suppose another site sharing the same server as you gets a front-page mention on PCWorld or some other huge site. They’ll be snarfling up bandwidth like crazy. Could it affect your site? Well, if their site is overwhelmed to the point that it crashes the server and you share that server, then the answer is yes. Ask any potential web hosting providers what happens in just these situations.

When it comes to disk space, chances are you’ll need 10 MB max, so don’t necessarily be tempted by those “unlimited space” hosting schemes. Reliability and speed, however, should be thoroughly discussed before you sign anything. A guaranteed uptime of 99.8% or better should be a rock bottom requirement. There is no such thing as “regular business hours” when you have a website. Even a little bit of downtime can cost you a customer. Remember: 99% uptime isn’t good enough. 99.5% uptime isn’t good enough. Insist on 99.8% or better uptime.

Does technical support answer 24/7/365? If you were to call tech support at 1:14 a.m. on a holiday, would you get a real, live person or a machine taking a message? If your site is experiencing technical problems, you need help now, not Monday morning when the staff gets back in the office. Insist on real 24/7/365 access to technical service by phone, email, and preferably live chat as well.

Important Things that Might or Might not be Deal Breakers

Chances are, you’re going to want email addresses at your own domain. Does this come with the hosting package? How many email accounts do you get with the hosting package? Do they give you a “catch-all” email that routes any email on the domain to you? What about autoresponders – do you get that capability? You should. Can you use your own email client with the email?

Your account should include the following: crontabs, MySQL, SSH, telnet, .htaccess, SSI, Perl, PHP, FTP. Even if you don’t know what these are, if you hire someone to redesign your site, your programmer will. Some commercial web hosting companies don’t let you install PHP or Perl scripts unless they give their approval. This isn’t ideal because it means that you may have to wait for them to give you the OK before implementing a new feature on your website. If you want to customize error pages, you want to have .htaccess. Same is true if you want to prevent bandwidth theft and hot linking. If you want to have a blog, or a content management system, you need MySQL. Telnet access or SSH are good for testing scripts and maintaining databases. Cron is actually a program scheduler that allows you to run programs at certain intervals, like once a day. This can be very useful, so don’t give it up without a good reason.

If you’re running an e-commerce site, make sure your hosting account comes with secure sockets layer (SSL) and a shopping cart program. Sometimes these will cost you a little extra. A little extra is fine, but don’t let them gouge you. If you want to have customers pay by credit card, then you need SSL for security or else nobody will risk shopping there.

OK, we might as well cover price. In many ways, web hosting is a “you get what you pay for” prospect. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t compare prices. There are several websites, such as webhostinggeeks.com (see screen shot) that put up head to head comparisons based on several factors. Free web hosting should generally be reserved for things like personal sites, and non-commercial uses. Free web hosting always involves agreeing to having banner ads on your page and let’s just say some of those banner ads aren’t the kind of thing you would want customers (or your grandma) to have to look at.

Other Considerations

Most webmasters like to have a control panel that allows them to manage parts of your web account yourself. You should be able to add and delete email addresses and change passwords at a very minimum. If you choose a host where you have to go through tech support each time you want to change a password or add an email account, it’s going to get very frustrating very quickly. If you’re interested in reselling web space or hosting subdomains, make sure your hosting provider offers this and how much it costs. And finally, it may matter to you what kind of server your site is hosted on. There are specific situations (such as writing or using ASP programs) that require you to choose a Windows server. Otherwise, you can choose between Windows and Linux servers.

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Fortunately, to have a great website today you don’t have to be an HTML wizard or have mad programming skills. There are plenty of technologies for web design that let you have a dynamic or interactive interface on your web pages. Four of those technologies are Ajax, Flash, PHP, and ASP.

Ajax is short for asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is a group of web development techniques that are used to create interactive web apps. Using Ajax, web applications can, for example, retrieve data from the server in the background without changing the display and behavior of the page the user is on. XML is not technically required, and the requests from the servers do not have to be asynchronous.

But it’s the asynchronous aspect of Ajax that people love. In standard web apps, interaction has to happen on a step by step basis in a frustrating game of click and wait. But with Ajax, the JavaScript that’s loaded as the page loads handles data validation and manipulation without a trip to the server and back. While it’s changing the display based on a visitor click, it’s sending data back and forth to the server, but the data transfer doesn’t depend on the customer’s actions. The result: almost total elimination of the slow click-wait cycle.

Ajax uses a combination of HTML and CS for creating and styling information. It is, in short, used so that web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small quantities of data with the server while working in the background, so the web page doesn’t have to be reloaded whenever the user requests a change. This goes a long way to speed up the page and make it more user-friendly. That’s because instead of having entire applications posted back to a server, you can have only a small part of the page update independently of the rest of the page. Bottom line: visitors will hate you if you make it so the page has to reload every time they respond to an on-page interactive component.

Flash is used to add, well, flash to your website. It isn’t easy to learn to write good animations using Flash, so sometimes developers learn to use Flash and then feel like they have to use it everywhere to justify having spent so much time learning it. But you have to be careful with Flash because there are drawbacks to using it. For one thing, search engines have a hard time crawling websites that heavily use Flash graphics, so it’s hard to rank high with an all-Flash website. So it’s not a good idea to use Flash just because you can.

Whether using Flash is a good or bad choice depends on what your site is for. Flash is best suited as an animation tool, and it’s supported on almost all the web browsers that people use, so you can be pretty sure that if you build a site with a Flash plugin, visitors will see it as you intended it to be seen. Video is a good Flash application because it doesn’t require a plugin like Windows MediaPlayer, and Flash is good for games, because it has better browser support than Ajax. Also, vector graphics look prettier in Flash, and it allows image replacement for special fonts on a site.

On the other hand, unless Flash is optimized for a site, Flash applications can be big and take a long time to load. Sometimes the entire Flash site has to be loaded before it can even be used. People hate this. And frankly, that little graphical countdown clock is small consolation to those waiting to use a site.

Flash usually disables the browser’s “back” button. That means that if a user clicks it while deep in the bowels of a Flash site, they’re taken to the website they were on before they got to the Flash site. If they want to return to the Flash site, they have to re-navigate back to where they were on the Flash site. Face it: the average web surfer has the attention span of a gnat on crack and probably isn’t going to go to all that trouble twice.

PHP (which stands for hypertext preprocessor) is a scripting language that is open-source so that users have access to the source code and can build, extend, or otherwise customize it for their own use. PHP mostly works as a filter, as it takes input from a stream or a file containing text and / or PHP scripts and outputs another data stream. Usually the output is HTML. While it was originally designed to make dynamic web pages, PHP focuses mainly on server-side scripting now. This is basically a way of making web pages interactive. PHP is also popular in the development of frameworks that provide the structure for rapid application development in which apps are written as they are being planned, making it easier to crank apps out faster.

There are lots of other technologies for web design besides Ajax, Flash, and PHP, but these are three that are common. If you want to learn the basics of Ajax, go to http://www.learn-ajax-tutorial.com/. To learn more about Flash, go to http://www.w3schools.com/Flash/default.asp. If you’re interested in learning PHP, then try http://devzone.zend.com/article/627. While these are designed to make your site faster and more attractive and fun to visit, they aren’t the whole picture. Without content, the prettiest site in the world isn’t going to keep people coming back.

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Education specialists will tell you that some of us learn more readily from reading, some from hearing, some from video, and some from doing. It only makes sense that when you conduct an internet search, you avail yourself of all the options when it comes to the information out there on the subject you’re interested in. That’s one reason why multimedia searching is a good idea.

Another reason is that sometimes the best information is something other than a written web page. For example, if you were to find a web page describing a newly discovered piece of music by one of the great composers of the past, the description would no doubt be interesting, but you could really appreciate it better if someone had posted a recording of someone playing the composition.

Likewise with video. While it can be thrilling to read a news story about a very close speed skating finish at the Olympics, you can experience it better if you watch a video of it.

When it comes to using multimedia to improve your search engine rankings, there are a number of ways to do it. You can post your own video content, or you can embed relevant video onto your page.

However, if your site is updated daily with just another video and no unique content, you won’t benefit much, if at all. Google has ways of dealing with duplicate content that will keep you from boosting your search engine rankings by re-posting content from other sites. Some people refer to it as a “duplicate content penalty,” but this is somewhat of a misnomer.

What Google does NOT want you to do is create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with mostly the same content. They don’t want you to create affiliate sites with little to no original content on it. The content has to be the star. Duplicate content isn’t usually a grounds for action by Google unless it appears that the whole reason for the duplicate content is to manipulate search engine results. Google does not want its top 10 results to belong to a handful of domains or subdomains belonging to one entity. They want the top 10 to reflect a variety of information and not just be 10 URLs, all containing the same information. When Google encounters this, it chooses one URL to be the “representative” URL for the bunch.

OK, now that the lecture is over, here is what you do to use multimedia to help you rank higher. The term “multimedia” generally refers to video. If you can post original video that you created, that is best. If you can’t, then what you can do is go to a video site like YouTube and dig for video that is relevant to the content of your site. Once you find a good video that makes sense on your site, you can embed it using the instructions on YouTube.

But that’s not the end of the story.

You have to add original content around the video. For example, you may want to write a transcript and post that after the video for hearing-impaired visitors. Or you might want to write a review of the video. In other words, you have to add value to that video in order for it to help your site.

So even if you use multimedia content on your site, you can’t get away from the need to provide original, fresh content.

The same is true when you link to other content. You can’t just say “click here” and hope that the link adds value to your site. Any one link isn’t going to do much. To help you, links have to be relevant, and they have to appear as a part of a larger whole that is your site’s content. The ultimate goal is to rank highly not only for regular web content, but also for images and video.

In the screen shot, you can see the search results of the phrase “winter olympics snowboarding.” Notice that in addition to News and “regular” web content, there are image results and video results. If your site shows up in one of these, then you’re obviously doing something right with your multimedia SEO.

Another tactic that may be worth a try is using a service like Veeple that embeds searchable content inside videos. When you upload video to Veeple, the title and keywords you enter will be included in the embed code and in the URL link. That makes it far easier for search bots to find video by title and by keyword.
Multimedia content on your site can help your SEO efforts if done well. Aggregating information without adding original content won’t help, but practices like embedding original video or embedding video from a video site as well as adding original content will help. There is really no way around providing original, well-written content as the heart of your SEO efforts.

The web is much more of a multimedia experience than it was just a couple of years ago. Video content is almost as much a part of the typical website as images and links are. If you can leverage video content to help your search engine rankings, you’re working on a balanced approach to SEO, which in the long run is your best strategy. While video doesn’t necessarily have to be the staple of all your content, you shouldn’t ignore it either.

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It is true most SEO companies can offer strategies that will boost the rankings for standard websites with less than 20 pages of content and for a small range of niche keywords. Ecommerce SEO requires a lot more planning and resources to become successful, this first guide in a series will aim to provide a checklist to those that are about to start-up their own ecommerce empire.

The Problem with start-up Ecommerce SEO

• E-Commerce websites often resell goods by big brands, the top 10 search results are often dominated by the big players with deep pocket.
• E-commerce website platforms are notoriously difficult to perform on-site SEO.
• E-commerce websites are prone to duplicate content penalties, or do not offer good content value for search engines.
• And in most cases ecommerce website owners fail to budget SEO into their startup costs. Spending a fortune on website design but zero budget for SEO.

Plan ahead for success

If you are just beginning your journey to start an E-commerce website, plan ahead for your success by following these steps and head over to out guides page to download the accompanying checklist ,

Budget at least 30% of your investment for search engine optimization.

This includes SEO both onsite and ongoing costs. For example ( from a $10,000 investment, $3000 should be proportioned for SEO. This includes $1000 for keyword research and onsite optimization, $2000 for ongoing SEO, which should get you 3 – 5 months of ongoing SEO.

Search hard for a good developer, do your due diligence.

For ecommerce websites, I would certainly recommend a larger firm with proven experience in producing e-commerce websites. Also be on the look-out for companies that can offer all-in-one services, this will save you time and money in the long-run, where both aspects of your online business can be managed together.

Choosing the right e-commerce platform.

Going Open Source. Will you be using an open-source platform such as OSCommerce, Zen cart? The advantages are generally

• lower development costs,
• portability ( meaning if your developer goes bust you are not stuck with a lemon )
• Wider community support base ( if you are developing the site yourself, this is a good option. )
• Loads of free plug-ins and add-ons.

Going Custom. A custom-built platform will offer the best flexibility and customization options, which may set you apart from your competitors. The down-side of this is higher development costs and SEO firms may have difficulties working with your system.
Refer to the e-commerce SEO checklist for what to ask your developer.

Search hard for a good SEO.

Part of your pre-planning should also include selecting an SEO firm that has proven experience in e-commerce SEO. They should also be comfortable working with your chosen e-commerce platform, longtail SEO campaigns and preferably content generation. Refer to the ecommerce checklist for questions to ask your SEO.

Know your competitors and start small.

To be successful you must indentify who your competitors are. I would recommend splitting this into a Global competitor list and a local competitor list and further separate them by short term and long term competitor. Your SEO should be able to help you create this list. Start small by first eliminating your local competitors in the search results, once you have the momentum look at tackling the big players. Be honest with yourself, SEO’s are not magicians – your SEO budget will directly affect your SEO performance.

Going Longtail.

The best ecommerce SEO strategy for those that are on a small budget is using a long-tail SEO strategy. If your products are not niche, and your competitors are dominating the generic search results. Focus on developing a long-tail SEO strategy to capture traffic from less competitive keywords or phrases, by combining a good content creation plan and good Keyword research.For example – rather than focusing on “Digital Cameras” which would be highly competitive, a longtail strategy may include keywords such as “Cheap Sony digital camera” + “buy Sony digital camera” which may be less competitive, but still bring favorable results. A longtail strategy will involve more content creation ( see below ) and onsite SEO rather than link building.

Content Content Content.

Yep, content is king in most cases of ecommerce SEO, and especially where you are using a longtail strategy. Ask yourself if you are willing to participate in writing good unique descriptions for each product category and product description. If you are not be prepared to hire a content writer. Copy and pasting the vendors product description is not going to win you favors with search engines. Remember Google can not see the awesome photography which you have paid a fortune for. They can only see the text on your website.

To blog or not to blog?

Most ecommerce websites now-adays will sport a blog as well. But a blog will only be useful if you have fresh relevant content. If I had to choose between creating content for product descriptions and a blog for SEO, I would choose product description creation. A blog can work in a social marketing concept. SEO wise, stick with the product descriptions.

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If there’s one huge problem that a smart webmaster should fight as hard as s/he can, this is it. This can never be stressed enough: grab any and all good opportunities that you find on the web as soon as you can. And once you start, do not give up so easily.

I’m going to tell you a real-life story to illustrate my point:

K. started surfing the web because she wanted to have some fun and research her favourite subjects. As time went by, she naturally made friends with other Internet users, joined forums, mailing lists and became a loyal visitor to various sites in a specific niche.

One day she realised that there was a certain type of website missing in that niche. So, she decided to fill this gap with her own web project. It was totally amateurish… yet it soon became pretty successful, because of three major factors:

1. She was a sort of pioneer, because she detected a need in her niche and was the first one to do something about it.

2. She really knew what she was dealing with and even devoted part of her time to expanding her knowledge on the subject, so she could improve her website on an ongoing basis.

3. She had good networking skills, so it wasn’t hard to spread the word about her site.

However, she wasn’t able to make a single cent from that site and eventually took it down. Why did this happen?

* She stopped investing in networking and promotion.

* She believed that the niche was about to collapse, so she lost the motivation needed to keep her site up.

* She thought a site like that couldn’t be effectively monetised.

This is what happened afterwards:

• She eventually realised that the webmasters which persisted and kept their sites alive are now recognised as true authorities in that niche, because they’ve been around for a long time. Consequently, they don’t have to spend much — if any at all — time with promotion.
• The niche never collapsed. Much on the contrary: it’s still growing and there are no visible signs that it’ll be stopping any time soon.
• Several new monetization techniques have been made available to webmasters, even to those who deal with smaller sites and restricted niches.

Talk about missed opportunities!

Had she persevered, now she wouldn’t have to use her own story as an example and alert for other webmasters.

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As a result, I’m going to share with you a short list of broader niches and related subniches that can be found inside each of them. Hopefully, after reading this article you’ll be able to apply and/or adapt its concepts to your own needs as a webmaster.

Ready? Let’s start then:

1. Writing

Since I’m a writer, I can’t help but using this niche as my first example. “Writing,” in this case, is the broader niche. So you could build a site on general writing topics. Or you can stick to just a single or a few aspects of the writing world.

Some possible subniches: article writing; SEO writing (which could either be attached to the previous one or result in a stand-alone site); fiction writing (you may create a blog about fiction writing in general or pick only one genre, such as fantasy or romance); journaling; inspiration, creativity and/or writing prompts; grammar and punctuation.

2. Anime & Manga

This is a very popular niche among both the general audience and webmasters. I’m an anime and manga fan myself. If there’s one broad niche where it’s extremely easy to spot subniches, this is it.

Some possible subniches: specific anime and/or manga series; specific characters, couples and/or seasons within a series; fansites about an author or studio; fanworks (fanart, fanfiction etc.); parodies; games; computer stuff (icons, wallpapers, screensavers, skins and the such); site and blog templates; quizzes and memes; soundtracks; voice actors; drawing lessons.

3. Mythology

This may be a pretty unusual niche to consider, but I’ve included it here because many webmasters do deal with unusual or less commercial topics. Actually, Mythology can be seen either as a broader niche on its own, or as a subniche derived from History, or perhaps from Religion/Spirituality.

Some possible subniches: specific deities; specific types of deities (war, fertility, family, wisdom, health etc.); myths from a given country or continent; role of women in various myths; relations between myths and historical facts; beasts; Mythology in Arts; Mythology in pop culture (films, TV shows, games and the such); Paganism and Neo-Paganism.

Now it’s your turn: take your desired subject and try to divide it into derivative, related topics, until you find something that you deem to be worth using on your web projects. And don’t be afraid of mixing subniches on a same site. Taking the first niche as an example, I might say that a blog which offers grammar tips and writing prompts at once will be likely to attract a good audience.

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One large site and nothing else

Some people pick a niche and put all their time, money and efforts in a single website, hoping that it will eventually become a dominant force on that topic.

The best thing about this practice is precisely the fact that you concentrate everything you have in one project. There won’t be any parallel sites to distract you from your aim. This is especially recommended to disorganised individuals. Besides, if you have to devote part of your time to a day job, or to studies, or to spouse and children, having a single site may be better than adding yet more duties to your already tight daily schedule.

Then main problem about this approach is represented by that old saying: “Don’t put all eggs in one basket.” If your only project fails, what are you going to do?

An ever-growing site network

Several bloggers and webmasters believe that when it comes to building web properties, the more, the merrier. They have one or more networks formed by dozens of small sites. None of them is intended to make more than a few bucks per day. But together, all those sites build up and eventually generate great profits.

The best thing about this approach is precisely this diversity. You put your eggs in many different baskets, thus reducing risks. If a few sites fail, no problem, because you’ll have many others to make up for them. This gives you the freedom to experiment a variety of promotional and monetization techniques. With the lessons learned, you’ll improve and expand your online business even more.

However, there is a disadvantage to this scheme: it’s time-consuming and requires self-discipline to work. If you have time-management issues, a site network may not be for you.

What would I choose?

While I do leave the definitive choice for you — only you can know what works best in your case — , I certainly have one or two personal thoughts to share.

What I used to choose was a sort of mix between these two online business models. I had a few sites, but none of them was too large and I never tried to turn them into an actual network. This worked for me because I also had a day job to deal with. Nonetheless, now I believe I should have tried to expand my business. The other day I missed the chance to make some good money because an advertiser contacted me and I had only a few sites to sell ad spots on. Had I invested in more web projects, he’d have bought more ads. Well, it’s never too late to learn with our mistakes, right?

This doesn’t mean that the very same thing will happen to you if you don’t start a large site collection. Nor does it mean that one single site couldn’t be lucrative. I’m just sharing a real-life experience with you, so you can see how these things may work in practice. Different webmasters have different experiences, though.

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Why am I writing about this topic once again? Because I feel this is an activity many webmasters neglect. But I know that just saying something is good doesn’t mean much; people want details. And this is what I’m going to give you today.

What should you analyse on a competitor’s site?

First of all, you must be able to determine how successful your competitor is, because this will influence all the rest. If your competitors are successful you’ll want to use their sites as models. If they aren’t, you’ll want to identify their mistakes and/or see if they are just about to achieve success.

I’ve already written a whole article on how to choose the competitors you’ll monitor and measure their level of success. Go read it if you still haven’t.

Now let’s see which aspects of a competing site you might study:

• Design: This should be the easiest one. How does the site or blog look like? Cluttered? Clean? Sophisticated? Amateurish? If you’re studying a site that is popular despite having a cluttered, amateurish design, how can you explain its success? Maybe the niche is a less demanding one, or maybe the content is just too good to be ignored.
• Technical stuff: How is the competing site built? Does it use html, php, asp, cgi or what? If it’s a blog, which platform is used? Is there any kind of plugin, extension or widget installed? How fast the pages load?
• Content: How is it displayed? Is it superficial or thorough? Is it informative, helpful, entertaining? Is it divided among several pages or is it concentrated on a few ones?
• Promotional efforts: These ones will also require visits to other sites in order to be detected. Do your competitors encourage visitors to recommend their sites to friends? If so, how do they do it? How often are your competitors linked by other people in their niche? Is their content usually voted for on social media sites? In case it is, do the votes look spontaneous or self-promotional? Have you ever found paid ads promoting a competing site? Where?
• SEO methods: Can you spot any signs of conscious search engine optimisation? How do the pages’ titles look like? Do the images have descriptive alt tags? What meta tags are used on the pages’ code? Do the authors seem to worry about keyword density? Can any attempts of PageRank sculpting be detected?
• Visitor activity: Can you find any evidences of visitor activity? Look for comments forms, guestbooks, forums, mailing lists… How do visitors behave? Do they look engaged? Are interaction opportunities taken by a small group of usual visitors? Or do they attract a larger audience?
• Monetization techniques: How do the competing blog or site make money? What are the ad spots like? Text links? Banners? Contextual ads? Where are they placed? How many ads per page? If the site owner offers any type of service, how is it promoted?
• Progress: This is easier when you study blogs, because they usually have archives. But some sites also contain lists of past updates. In any case, check the older material out and compare it to the current one. Has the webmaster or blogger made any visible progress? What has been changed for better (or for worse)?

You can always expand the list above by including other aspects that might be particularly important in your niche. Conversely, you can exclude aspects that you don’t deem to be so relevant, although I believe that none of the things mentioned in this article should be ignored.

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