top keywords or second teir? Cruise business!

hoopdaaron · #1 11-01-2004

We have an online cruise business, new to the web. As you would guess the competition is pretty intense.

the obvious keywords

Discount cruises
cheap cruises
disney cruise line
carnival cruise line

all are very popular

would I be better to try and optimize my site for these, or shoot for a less popular but also less competed for keyword?

such as

Discount family cruises
cheap family cruises
disney family cruise
carnival cruise line discounts

any thoughts or opinions?

hda

seobook · #2 11-02-2004

off the start try to go for a few variations of the lesser competitive type words and then over time hope to start ranking for some of the more general ones.

Chris Boggs · #3 11-02-2004

Your budget should dictate your goals, I believe. The more competitive terms will require more time spent on optimization efforts, including all-important linking.

If you just want to get your feet wet, I would agree with seobook and say that you might try with the "lesser" keywords first and get some pleasant "side effect" rankings within a year or so for "greater" keywords. This will depend on your traffic and linking, as well as your content, of course.

Good luck! Remember to create pages for cheap/discount, Disney, and Carnival terms, for the examples you listed.

Marcia · #4 11-03-2004

Welcome to SEW forums, hoopdaaron!

While it's a very competitive market, there are people in every sector who make a good living going after the less competitive, smaller "niche" type phrases of three, four and even five words.

Probably the best thing is to get together the most complete, comprehensive list of all possible keyword phrases you can and work them into topical groupings. Start with just the single word "cruise" at Overture and take it from there, narrowing down further and further.

massa · #5 11-03-2004

All right, I'll try to really confuse the issue.

My adivce is: Develop an objective and a strategy. In that strategy, hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

The objective should not be #1 on Google for cruises. It should be more like 30 sales the first 60 days and within 6 months up to 100 sales per month. Or 30 hits a day within 30 days increasing to over 100 a day within 6 months. Those kind of things are going to create MUCH, MUCH less stress in your life. I should know. I'm usually one of the most stressed out people I have ever met.

>would I be better to try and optimize my site for these, or shoot for a less popular but also less competed for keyword?<

The answer to both of these questions should be yes. Actually, my experience has been that you can not do one without doing the other. Target the big words and you start getting the little ones. Target the little ones and eventually the big ones come on their own.

You have gotten excellent advice from all three of my esteemed colleagues. Notice the underlying theme? Get a list of all, no make that --- ALL --- keywords and variations that you can actually deliver value for. Think about non-smoking cruises, wedding cruises, cruises with day care, etc. Do they have lesbian cruises? Christain cruises? Weight watcher cruises, things like that? I don't know any overweight, christain, lesbians to ask right off the top of my head.

If you build content for a wide variety of keywords, get inbound links with specific anchor text going to the right specific page, (in other words, anchor text of christain cruises going to yourdomain.com/christain_cruise.html), then point those interior pages to your main page with the anchor text CRUISE, you will start generating targeted traffic almost overnight, (depending on how much content you actually create). Keep adding content, always with the objective of providing value for the specific content created, and you will hit #1 for cruises, guaranteed.

Of course it could take several years.

If you want "cruise" at #1 faster give me a call at 1-800-youcan'thandlethetruth

Chris Boggs · #6 11-04-2004

Quote:

Originally Posted by massa

The objective should not be #1 on Google for cruises. It should be more like 30 sales the first 60 days and within 6 months up to 100 sales per month. Or 30 hits a day within 30 days increasing to over 100 a day within 6 months. Those kind of things are going to create MUCH, MUCH less stress in your life. I should know. I'm usually one of the most stressed out people I have ever met.

This is very sound, but sounds almost like projecting for the purpose of PPC marketing instead of SEO. With SEO, I lean towards planning for a certain number of new positions within search engines for particular terms within two months, rising (hopefully) in successive months. I believe the sales goals should be used more for assessing the conversion ability of the website. This is very important as well, and the PPC platform offers good traffic and the ability to test particular pages for such analysis.

Quote:

Originally Posted by massa

Get a list of all, no make that --- ALL --- keywords and variations that you can actually deliver value for. Think about non-smoking cruises, wedding cruises, cruises with day care, etc. Do they have lesbian cruises? Christain cruises? Weight watcher cruises, things like that? I don't know any overweight, christain, lesbians to ask right off the top of my head.

Ok first laugh of the day (I thought of one, believe it or not). If you can brand a particular page towards any of the massa-suggested themes, you will look more legitimate. A home page link to “lesbian cruises” that leads to a whole page will go a long way towards impressing said lesbians, IMO. And THIS is the key to SEO: optimize for the user and the SE will follow.

Quote:

Originally Posted by massa

If you want "cruise" at #1 faster give me a call at 1-800-youcan'thandlethetruth

Laugh #2…thanks again massa

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