Keywords: Are people looking for your blog?

Keywords are the words people type into search engines. Do you know what keywords people are using to find your blog? How can you make sure your blog ranks for the “right” keywords?

This is keyword research, the foundation of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When you work on your site using the words that people would use in search engines to find sites like yours, you can work to improve your search engine rankings.

Choosing Keywords

Choosing keywords is part art and part science. For the science part, one easy, free tool is the Google External Keyword Tool. If you’ve already chosen a niche, you should have a start on the topics and areas your blog will cover.

Once you have a few keywords to feed into the Tool, it will generate related terms, so you can find the real search terms people use. If you call it “sing at home mom,” the tool’s going to tell you that most people say “stay at home mom.”

If you can’t come up with a list of keywords on your own, the Tool can also read your site to generate relevant keywords—but be careful which page you pick (my main page right now would bring back a lot of keywords on lawn maintenance 😉 ).

I know that my cute tag line [mom’s search for meaning] isn’t going to bring a whole lot of visitors (the Tool reports “not enough data” for that keyword). Keywords like [how to be a happy mom] and [mother fulfillment] also don’t get a lot of traffic. Perhaps my best bet is [moms encouragement], which has a few hundred as the traffic number, and no advertiser competition.

While we’re talking about natural search results here, and the advertiser competition has to do with the paid ads on the top and sides of the search results, you have to also look at the competition. I mean, you actually have to look at the other pages that are already ranking for those words and see if it looks like they’re trying to stay there.

If you want to rank in the top ten, [mom blog] is going to be a challenge. But maybe [knitting sahm blog] or [puppy sahm blog] or [motoX mom blog] (ooh, I’d like to see that one) would be a little less competitive.

So an ideal keyword will be:

• high volume (so you get visitors)
• relevant to your site and niche (so your visitors won’t be disappointed
• not too competitive (so you can rank high without working for a year)
• not too long (the longer it is, the less competitive it is, but the harder it will be to incorporate it into your site.

Next week, we’ll take a look at what you can do to improve your ranking for relevant keywords.

Keys by Kit