It’s always amazing to me how little attention is paid to niche areas in the halo of competitive search terms. Dig around on any of the big four search engines and you’ll see dramatic competition drop off on quirky keyword combinations.

Take finance. I’ve been researching news, comment, and blogging habits around a key finance term and differing lifestyles and there are a number of opportunities for the savvy search marketeer. A great example: “eco friendly” is a zeitgeist term right now and it’s set to grow significantly. Lifestyle financial packages are emerging, and banks are getting ethical as public opinion strengthens.

Demographics are your friend

Free, friendly, and quick demographic info suggests that the ethical consumer has a higher pay bracket. Paid solutions reinforce this.

Anyone out there running finance clients should be digging through their analytics and onsite search stats to see if the interest has crept onto their brand. If it has, you need to act.

If it hasn’t? You need to act.

Niche & lifestyle keyphrase terms

Niche has a habit of becoming saturated. Spotting a new growth sector is gold dust.

Interestingly, one of the best ways to target such a niche is to build a community presence. Try getting content up that’s fresh, unique and relevant. With an eco lifestyle finance term try to address your user’s concerns in an offbeat way. Be approachable.

Go back to your analytics. Put yourself in their shoes.

Most of all…keep it to yourself.

Ah.

I’m watching old episodes of Cranky Geeks (Dvorak is pretending to be Nick Nolte for Halloween) while I work on Thunderbird filters and I think the above.

This is my disclosure moment which will be referenced in future posts (Hello people from the future! Are you sitting comfortably?). I’m a technically minded chap from well known SEO company bigmouthmedia. However everything published on this blog is of course entirely my own opinion and shouldn’t even be taken seriously, let alone considered professional advice.

But is that the real you?

This is what I look like as an SEO professional and as a scruffy geek with little spare time. That’s all there is. Apart from some blog of course.

Hopefully now you’ll be feeling even more relaxed about my stance on anything controversial, potentially libelous, genuinely thought provoking, or simply au courant.

* Of course you are!

Often underrated in the push for best practice is password admin and general housekeeping in the back-end.I’ll worry all day long about Id v’s Class usage for site design style sheets, but having just spent 3-4 hours clearing up my admin, role permissions, passwords and user profile options I’ve come to realise that CSS standards are simply so much fluff in the face of core site maintenance.

Can you bulk change all your ftp passwords? I hope so, I’m going to start digging and I’ll share what I find.

CMS systems vary wildly in their friendliness, but hardly anyone seems to talk about mass tweaking. They should. It’s crucial. If you head up a development team then multiply that last statement’s sonorous tone by 100.

Password Protocols

I hope you have some. But I hope they aren’t logical. Think like a machine and you’ll likely get hacked. Remember: SSH is your friend: never go online without it (I’d feel naked, I think).

Yep. And in that order too. Basically.

It’s a lame theory I had back in the day that has kicked around my head for just too long. It’s about priorities and all about online. Online life. Web design. Search optimisation. It’s the new economy, and a new way of life - wait, no: it’s almost completely *not* about ways of life. Although of course it is.

It’s about building a new blog in two minutes to pass the time because you were looking at Google’s homepage and suddenly went blank with your cursor in the search field.

Fact: it won’t all be like this. And, yes, there are a few changes I’ll be making.

And so?

First up: wordpress transformation sliced and diced into my life, my design, and some good old fashioned SEO nuggets.