Internet Niches: How to Discover Your Niche on the Web

What is an internet niche?

An internet niche are the pages of results which a search engine gives to a search query made by a searcher online. It usually results from a key phrase of three or more key words formulated by the searcher. These pages of results have information relevant to the key words or key phrase used in a search in Bing or Google. If this is what is meant of an internet niche, then a "Catholic" internet niche would then be all the web pages that would contain content on the Catholic faith from a search query using "catholic" as one of its key words.

In principle, we should determine what internet niche each web page on our web site would want to compete in. And also, we should find out what general internet niche we want our web site as a whole to enter and be part of. If we have that general internet niche for our web site already set in our mind, then all the web pages of our site would be set in better perspective. Every web page would then enter internet niches that carry key words and key phrases from that general internet niche of our web site.

General internet niche of a web site

At first, it was difficult for me to find out what the overall internet niche of our web site would be. It involved a trial and error method, wherein I made actual search queries on the Web. Since the Web is evolving very fast, the results to search queries also change in time. At first, the overall internet niche I thought of for our site was "catholic web developer methods". When I made a search query on this phrase, the competition was very tight. Our web site had to contend with big Catholic sites on the Web. However, when I added two more key words that would make our web site reach a specific target market, we were able to obtain moderate traffic. The key word I added was "basic" and "small". Thus, I was able to discover a general internet niche for our web site: "basic catholic web site developer methods" and "small catholic web site developer methods".

Including the overall niche in specific web pages

Given a clearer picture of what our web site is all about, it now follows that each page of the web site would then include this two key phrases in as many variations as it can possibly have. Aside from this clearer direction, all web pages in the site have now a common "thread" that binds them all together as one. And each web page can enter a specific web site development niche depending on the particular topic of the article.

How to discover your specific niche on the Web

From this experience, the best step to take is to consider first what overall internet niche you want your web site to be part of. And to make your web site stand out from the rest, you need to be really specific on your internet niche. If you can compose a five word key phrase that describes the general direction of your web site, then that would be good. If the key phrase specifies what target market on the Web you want your web site to serve, then that would be even better. The best key phrase would be one that gives a clear picture of the web site's service, who the target market is, and how your site can make a difference on the Web. This we can discover as we make actual search queries on the Web and see how our web pages are responding to the algorithms of the search engines.

How to apply this in your web pages

Once we have figured out what overall internet niche we want our web site to be part of, then we can easily optimize each web page so that it will reflect that key phrase in the following HTML code elements of a web page:

• in the text of the articles
• the page title
• the file name
• in an alt tag of an image
• the heading tag
• the key word meta tag
• the description meta tag
• in anchor text links
• the title attribute tag of a link
• as part of the navigation structure
• as part of the sitemap
• and even as part of a domain or subdomain name

Summary and conclusion

Despite the popularity of social networks, search engine optimization is still the basic method by which we can obtain moderate targetted traffic to our web site. This method is free and depends on our abilities to optimize well each web page of our site for the search engines. Not all the information we need can be found in our social networks. Sometimes, we need to use the search engines in order to obtain quality information. If we are able to develop a small Catholic web site that gives quality information on a specific subject, then we will always be rewarded with an amount of traffic commensurate to the work we do.

Dennis Emmanuel Cabrera
Web Site Administrator

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