Keywords - A Spider's Buffet

Keywords make or break your blog … use them wisely and mother Google will deliver traffic to your site, and you know that the more traffic you get, the more money you can make.

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:

The Gurus Are Duking It Out in Space!

Lo! What a feast of offerings from the gurus! It's as if all the top guns in the world of internet marketing have entered the virtual boxing ring in space and are duking it out for your dollars and mine. They tempt us with offerings worth thousands of dollars for free if we but buy their newest product that will take our own internet marketing up a notch or two.

Well, I gotta tell you. There is tons of good new stuff. Of course I bought some of the offerings hence my absence from my own blog. I have been reading, implementing and installing. The last of these for once and for all confirms that I am not a techie!!!

As I go through each piece that I have bought, if I think that the information/system/revelation will be of value to you I will post it along with my comments and observations.

Meanwhile, absense from this blog has indeed affected my modest statistical gains of February. While visits to this site from the search engines was almost 12% of total visits in February, that statistic has fallen prey to "no new content" which means that the robots are not taking anything back to the spiders to make it worth their while to come and crawl this site which means that Google and other search engines have siderailed their interest! More on that in some future blog - in the meantime, unless you too are up to your ears in new courses that you are trying to wade through, BLOG! Or the spiders will ignore you too!

I have also been working on a report to offer visitors that can be downloaded for free. It will be in a very simple format and is aimed for the wet behind the ears newbie. My observation is that beginners in Internet Marketing get so overwhelmed with everything out there, they simply do not know where to start. Many buy a full course (like I finally did a few years ago) only to find that once past the first three or four lessons they are in deep waters and barely tredding(like I was).

In my opinion, it is best to start with one simple program which helps you set some foundations - you know, start building your internet muscles. That report will be ready for downloading early April.

Happy Blogging!
Valentina

PS... Wonder what kind of cheese the gurus buy?

Blog Posts .... get 'em ready, post 'em often

Before you start rolling the presses with your new blog --- whether you go with blogger or wordpress, do a little bit of planning. By now you have chosen the topic for your blog, now plan at least 10 posts. If you are doing a review style blog and say your topic is dog toys , you should at least have 10 topics on dog toys, written and ready to go. Here is what I mean

post 1 - How to choose good dog toys. What you look for when you are selecting toys for your dog.

post 2 - Review a new Kong dog toy.

post 3 - Soft Toys or Hard Toys?.

... well you get the idea. The reviews don't always have to be about a toy. What about reviewing a dog toy site you found on the website, what do you like about it. What in your opinion could improve it. Your overall impression.

This is an important step. Too often people launch a blog, all eager and ready to go. They post two, maybe three posts, and then have to come up with an idea for a fourth post and cannot find appropriate content. A degree of discomfort sets in and an ever so slight coolness begins to seep in. Soon, the posts are far and few in between. There is no traffic. The promise of making money on the blog is a distant memory. The blog languishes.

DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU.... this is a business - treat it like a business. Every business requires a plan. Plan a topic within a topic and expand. For example if you are writing about chocolates, then about mid to end January you should start writing articles on Valentines Day, where to buy the best chocolates online (your affiliates). Review some of your favorites. Post a picture of yourself munching on those decadent morsels. Ditto for March ... St Patricks Day, then there is Easter. If you plan basics for the whole year, you will never run out of content.

But Ten Articles? Come on Valentina?

Yes ... its a good way to get started. First it is a good discipline to develop. Then when you open your blog, post them 2 or at most 3 per week (nicely spaced), all the while writing additional articles. The spiders will love this. Here is a new active blog and the more relevant and fresh the postings, the better these cyber critters like to dine out on it and bring back good reports to the search engines.

More on posting articles on your site further down the road, for now write those articles and get ready to launch your site.

Coming soon .... ok, next week. Announcement of my next blog, its topic and related information.

Quick Links
Dog Toys World