Keywords is the diet of those crawlies on the internet – the spiders – that come visiting your website for relevant content and if they like the spread of the buffet which is your article they carry a favorable review back to their Search Engine. I tend to refer to Google as the mother of all search engines, but there are many, many out there. Two other biggies are MSN and Yahoo and they all have their army of spiders.
How to use keywords, and more importantly, how do I find the good ones for my topic?
Good question grasshopper.
Let’s use this blog as an example. The topic of this blog is blogging, so blog and blogging are my main keywords. As mentioned in an earlier post, this certainly defies my own suggestion and that of the gurus to select a topic that is inch wide and mile deep – OK… I am going for the long term. I love the topic and eventually, one day mother Google will smile kindly on this blog and maybe, just maybe put it on page one. But of the two, which keyword is more likely to earn that spot?
There are lots of ways to do keyword research, many of them requiring several steps. Wordtracker is a software program that many gurus recommend. I use Market Samurai. Both have a basic free option, which for the beginner at least gets you started. Both offer a for fee option. I took the latter with Market Samurai. It is a new program, indeed still in beta. I was introduced to it when I took the 30-Day Challenge last year (watch this space for the announcement of this year’s Challenge). It is a one time software program purchase which updates frequently. Here is what I found using Market Samurai:
Blog: daily searches: 1,827,945
Blogging: daily searches: 32,877
So of the two, Blogging has a better chance of eventually showing up on page one of Google. But if I do my marketing right (and therein lies the challenge my little chickadee), search engines will deliver traffic to this site for that keyword.
When I put in “blogging” into Market Samurai, it delivers 200 related keywords, including phrases. Here are some of the more interesting ones:
Blogging for money – 145
Blog for money – 145
Make money blogging – 595
Blogging tools – 217
Blogging for dollars – 33
And so on…………
So “blogging for money”, “blog for money” and “blogging for dollars” seem to be closer to my reach. In fact, ideally one of them should have been the domain name for this blog. Alas, the domains were all taken! But I can still fight for those phrases by frequently sprinkling my posts with them.
The next thing I want to know is who is my competition for those keyword phrases. I like Blogging for Money. I ask Market Samurai to deliver my top 10 competitors and here is a screen shot of what I am up against:
I see some interesting things:
Competitors no 9 and 10 seem to be within reach. Let me explain.
Competitor no. 10 has had the site up for 3 years, enjoys a Google Page Rank of 4 and has a total of 652 links pointing to a webpage (presumably one that says blogging for money), and 882 total number of links pointing to the entire domain.
Competitor no 9 on the other hand is only a 2 year old site, has a Google Page Rank of 2 yet outranks the 3 year old site. This may have something to do with the links which are 2340, and 4380 respectively - Links coming up in the future.
So there is hope in the land of “blogging for money” but I need to attack it aggressively as clearly No. 9 is going for the top and has a two year leg up over me.
Another interesting thing is that positions 4 through 7 do not show any hard data. I checked them out, but for now, will leave that alone.
What other relevant to blogging keywords might I use in my future posts? I just run down the 200 keywords that Market Samurai delivered, select a few and include those words in my posts – ideally using them in my title. My goal? Set out an ever changing keyword buffet to keep those hungry spiders visiting Blog Along With Me!
Happy Blogging!
PS… Heading out to San Diego to attend Frank Kern’s Massive Control seminar. Hmmm … can hardly wait to pick up lots of cheeseworthy morsels to post on here!
Quicklinks:
Wordtracker
Market Samurai:
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