Chapter 1 - What is a Niche Market? - Are You In It To Win It

The basic strategies of Internet niche marketing really do not vary drasticallyfrom the basic strategies used to market offline. In both cases the bottomline is the investor needs to develop a strategy for reaching a targetaudience and then entice members of this audience to perform a desiredaction. Sometimes this action is purchasing a product or service while othertimes it may simply be viewing a website, clicking on an advertisement orperforming another specific action.Driving Traffic to a WebsiteFor many Internet marketers the first step in their marketing strategy is todrive traffic to their website. One of the most effective ways to do this isthrough search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is a practice in whichwebsites are designed and content for these websites is written in a mannerwhich makes search engines believe the website is valuable to visitorssearching for particular keywords. The relevance of optimizing a website forparticular keywords is that visitors who search for these terms are likelymembers of the target audience.Each search engine uses a unique algorithm to determine the worth ofparticular websites relevant to keywords and returns results ranking thesewebsites accordingly. This is significant because Internet users arecategorically looking for information quickly. They also tend to rely on searchengines to rank websites accurately and are much more likely to visitwebsites which are on the first page of results when they search for aparticular word or phrase. Websites which fall on the second page may bevisited but those further on the list are not likely to generate much trafficthrough search engine results. Search engine algorithms consider a numberof factors when ranking websites. Some of these factors include keyword