How to Boost Your Blog Traffic Using Keywords

Basically, keywords can do a lot of magic to your blog in terms of traffic through search engines. It is because search engines understand your blog through keywords. When someone tries to search for a certain keyword through Google, Yahoo, or MSN, it will show results of the sites they have indexed containing the word that someone is looking for. Depending on the keyword consistency of the page and the site as a whole, the search engines display their results according to the authority of the site on that particular keyword from the strongest to the weakest; where traffic, most of the time, is exclusive only to those who are displayed on the first to the tenth results page. By using keywords effectively in your posts, theoretically, you’ll increase your traffic from search engines because you’ll get your site displayed on the first five or ten search result pages of your keywords. At the same time, you’ll have audience who are interested in what you have to say or offer because you appeared in their searches.

The concept might be simple to look at from this point but, frankly, it is a lot of work. SEO practitioners call it “keyword research” which was first used on traditional websites. Bloggers adopted the idea because, basically, blogs are websites too but with a much different purpose compared to the traditional ones. The strategy behind the practice is basically building your site/blog or article around keywords to optimize it for search engine indexing. The question now is how to boost your traffic using keyword optimization? Here’s how:


Brain storm your keywords

Usually, experts would tell you to think of words or phrases based or relevant to your blog’s theme or niche. Then, you have to start jutting them down to come up with a list of around 5-10 words or phrases. Your categories and the tags you always use in social bookmarking sites when submitting your posts can help you in forming them.

You can do this if you want it this way, but personally I’d prefer another alternative rather than coming up with a relevant keyword.

Find the hottest keywords

Sometimes, you might want to fight fire with fire rather than build things slowly because the keywords you’ve been brainstorming about don’t get a sufficient search volume which you could call a boost in traffic. And one way to get that hot traffic is to get highly searched keywords into your blog. Where do you find it? There are available tools out there which can help you in this respect. Some come with a cost while others are free. I wouldn’t recommend anything since I haven’t used any at all. What I’ll show you, though, are found online, free to use, and doesn’t require any installation.


There’s Lycos 50 where you’ll find the top searches made by Lycos users. It might not be the same as what’s being searched in Google, but does Lycos users’ search trend need to be completely different from Google? I don’t think so. The list you’ll find here is updated weekly. Each Monday they tally up the hits for each query during the previous week and make certain adjustments to come up with the list. You can read about the adjustments here.


Another one is HotWords.com. They provide the top 10 daily and monthly searches. And from here, you’ll get an idea that internet is used mostly for porn because they are the words that always get on top of the list. To know more about how they collect their data, see here.

One draw back here is that there’s no guarantee that the particular keyword you chose will be popular for long since what’s popular this week or month might be buried 100 feet under the next month. Also, these sources will not promise you accurate results because what they have are always estimates collected with filters which can affect how the data is interpreted. So, it’s always safe to check your keywords of choice which you’ll learn on the next step.

Use keyword suggestion tools

These tools will help you understand better the keywords you’ve acquired earlier by giving you other related keywords and keyphrases to your original keywords. What’s more is that they also include the estimated number of searches for your keywords per day.


Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from Wordtracker is a free online tool that suggests relevant keyphrases based on your core keyword. Enter a keyword and see in the results a long trail of keyphrases related to your keyword and their corresponding number of estimated daily search volume.


Seo Book Keyword Suggestion Tool is another free online tool that cross references your keyword searches from Wordtracker, Google, Yahoo, and MSN and displays the estimated daily volume of the keyword including the relevant keyphrases. It’s similar to the first one but a lot better. What’s good about this tool is that it also contains additional tools along with the search results to help you understand and optimize your keyword.

Based on your gathered results, choose the keywords that have a long list of related search phrases and bigger search volume. Why? The search volume determines the number of traffic you’ll be getting through your keywords, while the number of related keyphrases, on the other hand, determines the other keyword combinations which could become your potential source of traffic besides your core keyword. In short, the more of them the better. Additionally, these keyword suggestion tools may also provide you with a better keyword or keyphrase that has more search volume compared to your original one.

Determine the competition

The next thing to do is to determine if there is a good chance you will achieve your prized high search engine ranking or if the competition for that phrase is already saturated. One good indicator for this is through the search engines themselves. Search for the keywords you have chosen from above and look at the number of the results found. The more results the more the competition there is in that keyword.

Also, another method of determining your chances of getting a share of traffic from the competition is through analyzing the results of your keyword searches which is pretty complicated. For that I’ll recommend the following links for you to get a better view of how complicated it is: The Facts You should Know about Keywords Competition Research, Some Good Things to Know when Researching Competition in the SERPs, Keyword Competition Metrics.

Complicated or not, one easy way to know if you really have a shot of getting a better position in search engines based in your keywords is to look up your competitor’s backlinks. Go to Alexa.com and see how many sites are linking to your competitors. The more established and popular sites are linking to them, the more difficult it will be for you to beat them at their game. If this is the case, try to revisit your keyword suggestion tools and look for a relevant keyphrase to your keyword and determine your competition again.

Your Onsite Keyword Optimization

Once you’ve finally captured the right keyword/s for your post, you need to optimize your article for those keywords to give it an edge on getting a better placement in search engine results. You’ve already seen your competitors’ keyword optimization previously so you have to beat or match what they’ve already achieved for you to get better search engine exposure. Here’s my article on how to do just that: Use Keywords as Much as Possible.

Regarding the backlinks to your post, this is the part where it’s out of your hands completely. For your article to get better search engine ranking, you need to have quality links pointing to that article and to your blog. Although it’s out of your control, you can pretty much influence how things will work your way. And here are my other articles on how to do just that: Generate Inbound Links, Why Deep Linking is better than Simple Reciprocal Linking.

When performing your onsite keyword optimization, avoid over-stuffing your blog with lots of keywords because, obviously, search engines recognize this kind of tactic as a common trademark of spammers. By doing so, you might get penalized and be banned from the search engine forever.

Write for your target audience and not for the keyword optimization alone. Basically, your traffic will be pretty much useless if you couldn’t engage your readers to come back for more and perhaps click on your ads.

If you’re trying to use the hot keywords, you might want to find a way to merge your blog’s topic or niche into the keyword you have so as not to have an off-topic article from your blog’s theme. This is a common trend among bloggers who “hijacks” keywords to prevent search engines (Google in particular) from penalizing their rankings because it’s a form of “gaming” the search algorithms in itself.

Conclusion

Keywords definitely have the power to give your blog that much coveted boost of traffic, given that you do it wisely. Give more time on keyword research and the rewards will be great, something that I too should place great importance besides social media optimizations. I have provided some online tools that I’ve been using before and some techniques I found through my research which you could use for your keyword campaigns in your blog. The steps or sequence given here don’t necessarily reflect the exact pattern or sequence keyword optimization and research should be done. In fact, if you research on articles done by SEO experts themselves, it goes in different ways. This serves only as a guide which is supposed to help you get a better idea about using keywords in general. And lastly, before anything else, you must place more importance on your content’s quality; keywords are supposed to follow your content’s form and not vice-versa.



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