How to promote a general website?

How do you promote a very general website - too general to target any keyword? for example, a news website.

 

no site shouldn't be able to target ANY keywords, unless you've really got a specific plan of promoting it (and it sounds like you don't)

even for a news thing, there are things you could do. sure, you're never going to get the top ranking for "news." but there are still variations you could optimize for- I bet "online news" is a lot less competitive. each branch could have its own optimized keywords as well; online technology news, online sports news, only celebrity news, online global news.

use the keyword suggestion tool, that's what it's there for

 

I agree with disgust, head to the keyword finder and look at that huge list and see if any of those areas you might specialize in. There's bound to be a keyword phrase you can capitalize on!

Have you considered approaching other site owners about providing feeds to their sites? I imagine you could probably also do daily or weekly newsletter with the latest or hottest news stories.

I dunno. there's bound to be a lot of opportunities for a news site, especially if there's a niche or need you can fill.

 

Thanks for the very helpful reply, I'm not going to make a news site, just an example. For very general keywords, the seo is so weak.

 

I can't think of one case where there wouldnt be keywords to target. Even with news you have geographical, types, etc.

I think that the problem in most cases is that people just don't sit down and put tyhe work in to come up with high conversion keywords that fit. Instead its almost an after thought and then much of your SEO is wasted.

 

Let us take an example. Suppose your sitewide focus is on the keyword people. That probably classifies as a general keyword. But, you can still find valuable and specific keywords that incorporate people. In fact, using keyword resources like Wordtracker, one can also brainstorm the content areas that one should generate.

Thanks
Ajeet

 

I agree. There's always something you can come up with.

 

Why don't you give us a bit more of an idea of what your site will be like - community focussed, articles, photography?

If it were to be news though, there is no end of phrases to target - your main goal would be to be spidered VERY regularly and win / rank highly for current news items. So when someone types 'US Election Campaign' for example, you would want to be on top!

Your front page is not where you should be targeting your keyphrases - most of your visits will come from thousands of inner pages each targetting their own specific phrase. Even if the site is not about any topic specifically, the subpages have to be on some topic!

 

daamsie: I figured out exactly the same ide - get high PR. Getting the internal pages crawled frequently is much more important than optimizing the index page. It's a general software website, my primary task would be PR after I finish it.

 

recently I decided to run same type of site. It covers different topics like a book. I figure it out by dividing it to channels: health & fitness, certifications, computer tips, parenting and etch. I promote different keywords per channel using subdomains.

 

Hi hurricane,

PR is important, but even more important is just getting a LOT of links pointing to your site. If your terms are obscure enough, you don't need a lot of PR to get them ranked, but you do need them to get crawled regularly and some good incoming links can take care of that for you.

So software then; that's a specific topic There's any number of keyphrases to target - mostly the names of specific software packages. Try to find variants on them that aren't so heavily targeted, but will still draw visitors. It's better to be listed no.1 for a somewhat obscure keyphrase, than no.20 for a popular one in my experience.

 

Is there information from your site that other sites could use? Something like an RSS newsfeed. Something the other site's readers want but would take too many resources for the site's owners to develop on their own.

Definately think it through carefully.