Chapter 2
Choose your topic and your URL
Let’s face facts to make your mark on the internet you either need to be the size of amazon and do it all, or carve out a niche as a specialist supplier gearing everything you do towards surfacing through the background noise of the almost infinite web!
If you choose your specialisation, you can build the authority of yourself as an expert and your site and surrounding social media output and stand a chance of appearing in the search engine results that will feed you traffic and sales. There are several short cuts to getting traffic and making sales that I will share with you later, but long term if you become THE specialist in your niche, you will create value, and that is what it’s all about!
If your efforts are too generalised you will probably be drowned out in search results as the search engines will simply not recognise your site’s area of expertise. The major search engine’s technology is now so advanced that to feature in SERPs (search engine results pages) your site must be considered a leading authority on the topic it represents. This is not to say you can’t launch multiple websites each with their area of focus, in fact doing just that will make it easier to find quality traffic than one un-focussed website that is hard to understand and pigeon hole.
The first job to do when setting up a website of any type is to buy the website URL, people do this badly and cause themselves work loads of unbelievable proportions trying to make the site visible. Let me give you an example.
Let’s say you decide to set up an e-commerce website and your chosen specialisation is drawer and cupboard handles, very specialised quite a niche, this is a good idea, a strong start.
Now let’s think about the URL, the address that the site will sit on. If you read the SEO press there are conflicting reports on the importance of what follows, but in my experience and particularly when launching product specific micro sites (more about this later) this part is vital. The typical decision people make is to choose a brand, say “Grosvenor Designer Hardware” then go and buy www.grosvenor-designer-hardware.co.uk or worse still a URL like www.grosvenordesignerhardware.com
These choices may bolster “brand awareness” (whatever that is) or fly the company flag, but they won’t help people find your site for what it is you offer. When you first start, no one is searching for your company name, people are however, searching for cupboard handles and drawer handles so aim for those search terms when you buy your URL.
It is much better to buy a functional url that will drive traffic based on the search terms you need to be found for so think more along the lines of:
www.drawer-and-cupboard-handles.co.uk
www.drawer-and-cupboard-handles-online.co.uk
www.quality-handles-for-cupboards.com
www.best-drawer-handles.co.uk
Although these URLs seem clunky or not very catchy they will help your SEO efforts no end. I have got some URLs right and some wrong over the years and I know which sites have hit rankings, traffic and sales. By having search keywords in your URL you achieve two things, the obvious one is search engines scanning those money generating search terms in the top line of your website, the URL or web address. And two, people linking back to your site may use anchor text OR they’ll just use your URL. Tune your URL choice for traffic generation. Traffic is profit.
Buying the URL is the FIRST thing you do, get it wrong and at best you’ll triple the amount of time you spend on your SEO (search engine optimisation) efforts, at worst your business will fail. It is THAT important and it takes 2 minutes. Great if you know, positively chilling if you don’t.
Surf the net and search for some products, say guitar strings you’ll see amazon, eBay, expensive adword listings, all the big hitters, then specialised sites probably with “guitar” and “strings” in their URL. Wise choice of URL follow that model.
This is also why some web real estate is so valuable, like www.skateboards.com for example. The buying and selling of prime addresses happens like attractive number plates for cars. Another topic in itself.