Web Marketing Strategy Update

Keyword research is the first, and most important step in search marketing.

You can probably see why keyword selection would logically be the first task. But why most important?

Because if you choose the wrong keywords, everything else you do to improve your search engine rankings is wasted effort.

Or to be blunt: If you target the wrong keywords, you will not make money.

When you create a new website or web page, you want to focus the content on popular keyword phrases relevant to your subject matter. These are the keywords that people in your target market regularly type into search engines to locate information on the products or services you provide.

But it’s often the case that many of your first choice keyword searches will be very competitive, making it difficult — if not impossible — for you to get your pages to rank highly for them unless you employ an SEO expert.

What you need to do is find other, less popular keywords that are also quite heavily searched, yet are easier to rank well for because there are fewer competing pages in the search results (this also applies to Adsense keywords and other PPC’s, but in terms of paying less for your clicks because there are less competing ads).

If you’ve considered podasting in your marketing, you’ll be interested in this item I came across on WebProNews

Podtrac, a new podcast advertising company, has teamed up with Mediamark Research Inc. (MRI), a provider of magazine audience and multimedia research company, to provide advertisers and podcasters with demographic information about listeners to help them make better advertising choices.

The partnership hopes to bring the same kind of statistical information provided to networks and advertisers in traditional media to the podcast circuit.

MRI and Podtrac will provide ratings data, including an index of the data to MRI’s Survey of the American Consumer as a free service to any podcast through Podtrac. The Survey of the American Consumer is a national probability study of U.S. adult’s demographics, media and product usage, attitudes and lifestyle.

Podcasters will start by implementing Podtrac’s free Podcast Audience Survey. Podtrac will calculate indices to the Survey of the American Consumer for individual podcast survey results and provide the data to advertisers and podcasters free-of-charge.

“The Podtrac Survey together with an index to the Survey of the American Consumer provide a powerful tool for advertisers to determine the fit of a specific podcast audience for the target of their advertising,” said Mark McCrery, CEO of Podtrac.