Tenacious Creations

 Admit it you could not wait for Sexy Pirate Women - Lesson Two in Keywords. Well in this lesson we are going to look at how and why to use keywords. If you haven’t read the first part of this I suggest you do — Pirates are Sexy - Lesson One in Keywords.

 As I am a blogger and the majority of my readers are bloggers I am going to focus on using Keywords from a bloggers perspective (however if I keep doing Sexy Pirate Women posts my traffic demographic may change). It is still my belief that no matter what you do in your blog, in the end good content will get you more traffic and regular readers than anything else you can do. But you have to let people know that your content is there, and that is the job of the search engines. However if you use keywords properly you help the search engines along.

 Keywords however are not just for the search engines. If you are running adsense your ads are also based on the words you use in your posts. What it boils down to is that if you have keywords that attract the demographic of people you are after your ads will also be targeted to the same demographic.

 Most bloggers I know track their sites stats be it with Google Analytics or some other tracking system. This is a good way to gauge if what you are doing on your site to get traffic is working.

For example as illustrated in the graph to left only 10.58% of my traffic comes from search engines. This may not sound like a high number but compared to my November 2007 stats which indicated only 3.04% of my traffic came from search engines I have increased it significantly.

 Not only is my traffic up from search engines but I am also getting more adsense clicks. No it is not because the sexy pirate women are intimidating my readers to click on the ads. It is because the ads are becoming more tailored to my readers and offering them products and services they actually want.

 Now I know your saying to yourself “Okay thats great but tell me how to do that.”. Well the first step is to get to know your audience. Who are you targeting your writing to? What is your niche in the blogoshpere? For me these were hard questions to answer. Who am I writing for? Well anybody who is willing to read my blog. What is my target niche? Well I try to target people who enjoy being creative and are looking for resources to expand their creativity.

 For me each post I do is focusing on a unique group of people, kind of like sexy pirate women. So when I choose a topic to post on I ask my self these questions.

1. What am I providing in this post that will be deemed useful?
2. Who will this be useful to and in what way?

 Although this post mentions sexy pirate women a lot I doubt it would be of any benefit to them. My intention with this series of Pirates are Sexy - Lessons in Keywords is to inform my fellow bloggers on how I learned to use keywords to benefit me. Hopefully they can use what I have learned to benefit themselves.

 Knowing that my target audience is bloggers allows me to figure out which keywords to go after. There are terms that most bloggers are familiar with - traffic (in the sense of visitors to a web site), keywords (no not words that unlock things), post (not the kind you build fences with). Outside of the blogging world these terms mean different things, this is something you have to keep in mind when you write, or speak for that matter.

 I am an active member of my local Toastmasters club. If you don’t know Toastmasters is a group that helps you improve your public speaking by you giving speeches to your fellow Toastmasters. One thing that I have learned is terms that are familiar to me (baud, RAM, coder, EOD, HLVW, etc) are not to the majority of people. So to make my speeches appeal to a broader audience I make sure to explain these terms.

 Like wise when you are writing posts and trying to optimize your keywords you have to keep in mind you want to attract the larger audience. The classic example is with airlines. “Low fares” is more of an industry term in the airline industry, and although it is searched for, it is nowhere near searched for as much as “cheap flights”. My point - know your audience, and try to predict the terms that they would search for. Once you have determined that, then it is time to use resources like Googles Keyword Tool to see which terms are the most searched for. These are the terms your audience is using. By using them you are not only going to get some of those searches directed to your site, but you are also going to communicate with your audience better.

 In Pirates are Sexy - Lesson 3 I will discuss how placement of your keywords in your post affects there performance.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!