The late Conrad Hilton who built a chain of hotels across the world, was firmly of the belief that if he built a hotel in the right location it would make money. “Location, Location, Location” was his motto. Never build a hotel where there ain’t no traffic.

The same rule applies on the Internet. Build your site in the right location and it will succeed.

So the question is: “how do I find the right plot of Internet real estate on which to build my site?”

For the purposes of this exercise I would like you to imagine a smart seaside town called Google.

Along the sea front and around the marina, where the luxury yachts are parked, are smart hotels, casinos and apartment blocks. At street level in each of these buildings there are international shops like Tiffany, Gucci and Prada selling luxury goods.

In the next block back from the front are really nice houses owned by wealthy citizens. And behind them are not-quite-so-nice houses and apartments. So it goes, as you walk away from the sea front the houses and shops become less and less expensive. Until, just on the outskirts of the town of Google, there is a trailer park where the least wealthy citizens stay.

In the town of Google it costs a lot of money to rent one of the shops on the seafront because they are seen by large numbers of passers-by. These will be both the wealthy people staying in the town and day-trippers who are just sight-seeing. However, you can rent a shop in the trailer park for much less money. Here you will still get valuable passing traffic but the competition will not be nearly so great.

The mistake that most people make when they build their web sites is to build around keywords which all the powerful multi-nationals are using for their seafront stores. These organizations are spending mega bucks to get their web sites to the top positions on the search engines. Your chances of competing with them and achieving a top search engine ranking are very slim.

Much better to build your web site around the ‘trailer park’ keywords. Where you can still get masses of valuable traffic, but you’re not competing with the mega-buck budgets of the multi-national corporations.