On May 9th I wrote an article called SEO Case Study where we examined the Search Engine Results (SEO) of a site we work with called Evangelism Software. I was checking out the site today and had some interesting results to share with you. At the bottom of page 1, try and guess what showed up? The article I wrote talking about the keyword ‘Evangelism Software’. Why is the article outranking a page that is an exact match? Good question. This site is older than the ‘Evangelism Software’ site. It has more content and more links pointed at it. So in the short term it ranked higher. In case you were curious here is where the actual site returned on page 2:

The site is still hanging around. I told you in the first article that the site had the number 1 spot for nearly a month and didn’t get any traffic. The people at Evangelism Software have to decide how much work they want to put in the site. They could post a lot of fresh content and build links and get back to number 1, but, if there isn’t any traffic for the keyword, is it worth it? I suggested they let the site sit for a while, use it to link to their other sites, and see where it ends up as it ages. With a site like Evangelism Software, adding a post once a month ought to keep it fairly close to page 1. See if it gets any page rank on Google’s next update and then go from there. SEO is an important factor in how to create a blog.

P.S. I used the keyword Evangelism Software five times in this post in a very natural way. Let’s watch and see where this article ends up on the search results in a few days.

In real estate the old saying is location, location, location. In having a successful blog it’s keywords, keywords, keywords. Keywords are the words that people type in when they are searching for something on the Internet. One of the strategies for getting readers to your site is to target good keywords. When you write your articles you include keywords so that when the search engines come along they record the keywords and then when people search for those words they are directed to your site. Of course you need to get your site up near the top of the search list and there is a lot that goes into it, but today we are going to talk about keywords.

How Can I Get Good Keywords?

Fortunately there are some very helpful tools to find good keywords. Let’s start with a simple way to try and find a keyword. Not only do we want a keyword or keywords that get searched for often, we also want keywords that don’t have much competition. Let me give you an example. Let’s see what kind of keyword “keyword” would be. One helpful tool is the Free WordTracker Suggestion Tool. It allows you to see how many times your proposed keyword is being searched for.

I type in keyword and here is what I get:

There are a lot of searches for “keyword”. “Keywords” has 215 estimated searches. Now lets check out the competition. I am expecting the competition on this keyword to be outrageous. Here is how you find out. Go to the Google search bar and type in the keyword you are working with (in this case “keywords”) and see how many pages come up. Make sure you enter the keyword inside quotation marks. This narrows the search to just that keyword or combination of keywords.

Drum roll please….here are the results…

929 Million results!!!! Wow! That would mean that if I were trying to capitalize on the keyword “keywords” which gets 215 searches I would have to get ranked higher than 928,999,999 other pages. Good luck. What you have to do is find keywords that get searched regularly but don’t have much competition and then incorporate them into your posts and into your blog. If you can find a keyword that gets searched 40 or 50 times and has less than 20,000 results of competition that is more reasonable. It takes work but you can do it. Start by playing around with the Free WordTracker Suggestion Tool. Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends) is another helpful free tool. You can go to Google Trends and get an idea of what the top searches are every day. Plug some of them into the Google searchbar and see what the competition is like. Wordtracker has a free trial available where you can try their subscription service for a day. If you are interested click here to go to the Wordtracker Free Trial. Then you will probably need to expand your keyword program by purchasing some of the keyword tools available. Wordze has a daily subscription and a monthly subscrition to their service. This is convenient if you want to set aside a day for doing keyword research and just purchase the Wordze service for a day. If you are interested in a Wordze subscription click here. Wordtracker has a monthly fee or a yearly fee. If you are serious about keyword research then get this Wordtracker option by clicking here.

Putting Keywords in Your Posts

Once you select specific keywords you want to target in your blog you need to begin including them in your posts. For example, if I were trying to target “keywords” (which I am not because of the ridiculous search results for “keywords”) then I would write a post like I just wrote. The word “keyword” or “keywords” is in the post a lot, but it makes sense for it to be there. Typically you want to include your keywords in the title of your post and three of four times throughout the post. It needs to belong there, so don’t try and just drop a keyword in a place where it doesn’t make sense. Have fun experimenting with keywords! As I said in the beginning of the article, having a successful blog is all about keywords, keywords, keywords! (Someone should count how many times “keyword” or “keywords” shows up in this post. It might be some sort of keyword post record). I’m all “keyword”ed out for now. Another How to Create a Blog question answered.