Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Using Longtail keywords for blogs

Many of you who read this may not even understand what keywords are, let alone using longtail keywords for blogs.  So, being that this is "blogging lessons for beginners", we will start at the beginning.

Keywords are words that Google picks up on to determine search engine results.  What I mean is, Google and all other search engines have tools called spiders, spiders crawl websites and blogs and anything else they can find on the web. They use the sites URL, Description, Titles, and Content; they determine what are the primary keyword targets for that site. 

So, what does this actually mean to a beginner blogger?  If your site has no real purpose other than talking about yourself, it means nothing.  But for most bloggers, we want to be found, and we want to be read.  And whether your niche is video games or making money online, or anything else you can think of, when a person searches through a search engine, our goal is to show up on that first page of search.  Because anything after page one is a crapshoot.  Most Internet users will not search past the first couple of pages.

So, this brings me to my real issue, Longtail keywords.  Single word keywords like Money, or Loans or Football are killers.  Try searching those types of things in google and you will get some real powerhouse websites.  Chances of a little old free blog to show up for keywords like that are almost non-existent, but never fear, this is where long tail keywords will work for our blogs.  Take this blog for example:

This site is for about blogging when you come right down to it.  But what happens if you search the term “Blogging” in google?  This is what happens.  You get over 49million results and the top 10 are:

Wikipedia.org, Page rank (7)
Blogger.com, Page rank (8)
Blogspot.com, Page rank (6)
Problogger.net, Page rank (6)
Problogger.net, Page rank (5)
Wordpress.org, Page rank (6)
Marketingterms.com, Page rank (5)
Wordpress.org, Page rank (9)
Thoughts.com, Page rank (6)
Guardian.co.uk, Page rank (5)

Top 10 spots are almost unbeatable.  I guess if you worked incredibly hard, you may break into the bottom of that list.  But I doubt it.  Not very likely at all.

We will talk more about pageranking later, but understand this first and foremost.  Even really popular free blogs rarely break pagerank of 3.  Now page ranking is not everything, but it is a big deal.  And for most of us free bloggers out here, we have to be in a market with sites that rank no higher than a 4 to be competitive.

So, Just calling my site a blogging site was not gonna work for me, so, how about I try something else.  I figured since it was gonna be a learning type blog, we would go for terms that the average person my use to search when trying to learn to blog.  “How to blog” is a though, what happens?

456,000 results, way better than millions
page ranks are 2’s, 3’s and 4’s with a couple 6’s and an 8 in there.  Better, not great.

So I went a little further.. Now I am giving away my keywords for this site but, whatever…

Blogging Lessons for beginners

And

Blogging for Beginners

The first one, has 8 results.  This is perfect!!!! But problem is, it is not a highly searched keyword, and that is with it in “” meaning it has to show up just as I search it, but I will take it!!

Second is still perfect for me.
36,800 results
the highest site is pulling a Page rank of 6, but that is in the first spot.
So, longtail keywords for blogs is very, very important if you have any aspirations of ever being found.  This does not mean that as soon as you add a specific set of words you will be indexed for them, not at all, it is a process, you need keyword density and you will need lots of content before google will even consider your blog as relevant.

My main point with this post is, when you are writing on the internet, quality content is very critical, people still want quality, but, it is also important to remember that keywords are also critical, and choosing the right keywords are very important. 

And while it is really tempting to shoot for the stars, it is ok to go after small fish. 

3 comments:

  1. nice blog, i enjoyed reading it,
    •Include the keywords within the title tag so that robots of search engine get the instant idea what your page is all about. In addition to this, make sure that keyword is also included within the body’s page.


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  2. This helps a lot, I just added this feed to my bookmarks. I have to say, I very much enjoy reading your blogs.
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  3. Thank you for the blog. I also enjoy reading it. Good job!

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