If one of the objectives of your blog is to bring in new traffic (and our is), one possible way of getting that traffic there is via the search engines.
We optimise quite a few sites for particular search engines, but it not something we have promoted enough for blogs. The great thing about blogs is they are usually relevant and up to date (which the search engines like), which can’t always be said of websites.
So how do we go about optimising a blog? The first thing is deciding which keywords you want to optimise your blog for. In our industry we could go for:
web sites
web design
web marketing
marketing online, etc, etc. The possibilities are endless.
But we need to give ourselves a bit of a chance of getting to the top. The best way to do this is with a keyword analysis (something I’m sure we’ll have as its own heavy chef topic in the months to come). It simple really:
“Find the words people are search for that few websites are competing for.”
As a stats geek I love this sort of research, but others will hate. There are however tools out their to help you, such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery and a new piece of software we are using at the moment for our PPC keyword analysis called Keyword Elite. We will cover these in more depth another time. For the time being if you are doing this analysis fo the first time I would recommend Wordtracker as the tool to use, because you can purchase it for a period of time and as such can use it for a day for as little as 5.
We brainstormed all the possible words people could use to find our site – always bearing in mind the focus of our business and blog. We expanded these with Wordtracker and the tested them to se if any gaps existed in the market that we could exploit. We are also working on Sophia from The Cape Table Club who is brainstorming her possible keywords at the moment. Which we will then show her how to test for possible effectiveness.
Our choosen keyphrase from the results for World Wide Creative and The Heavy Chef Blog was:
“Profitable Websites”
And our initial target market is South Africa.
- Mike
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Good choice. Only 7 million results come up in Google when you search for “profitable websites”, so I’m sure you’ll be in the top 10 shortly.
Looking forward to watching your progress!
Don’t you trust my optimisation skills? You’re quite right 7 million is a ridiculous number to compete with. Thats why we are focusing on the SA market – closer to 20,000 (and 82 for exact searches). Still a lot, but in the website/web marketing industry their wasn’t a lot else going. And the number of searches on that term is good, so its worth fighting a little for.
- Mike
Great Post. I never thought of doing a keyword analysis before in order to create traffic to my site. Thats a brilliant idea. HOw do you do this analysis though? I am very interested in learning how to make my blog more profitable. There is this free conference in vegas that I am going to attend called Postiecon. Its going to be a great source of information on monetizing your blogs and websites. You shoudl check it out, I think i tmight interest you.
Thanks for the insight. Looks interesting – shame I’m going to be stuck in Cape Town though.
We’re running a workshp here tomorrow for our South African comrades about making your blog profitable.
A good starting point for keyword analysis is using the http://www.wordtracker.com tool. There is some good insight there into reasearching keywords and implimentation strategies.