Andy Coates Blog

Since I started this Blog a month ago I have been keeping a close eye on how people have been reaching certain pages through search engines. I use the Counterize II plugin which gives me in-depth results of my stats and shows the last 50 entries of how people reached my site, the referrer and the search term. What I have been looking for is specific search terms which rank my page in the top10 of a Google search. For example if you use Google to search "buy house level 2 survey" my post "A rough guide to buying a house part 2" come up as the 5th result. Along with other search terms this particular post receives quite allot of traffic simply because it is quite a long post and Google has a better chance of matching part of the content to a particular search term.

To encourage your posts being found for various search terms for a particular subject you can research which keywords are searched the most for a particular subject using Yahoo's Overture Keyword Selector Tool, for example this post is aimed towards SEO, so if I enter SEO into the Keyword selector tool it tells me that SEO was searched for 46777 times in one month. Whats more is that it also displays a list of related search terms relevant to Search Engine Optimization and how many times they have been searched for. If you can make a note of the most popular keywords/search terms related to you post subject and include them in the content you have more change of your posts being picked up by search engines for various related searches.

NOTE: There is a well known "un-ethical" SEO technique called "Keyword Stuffing" which means repeating a particular keyword in a web page in an aim to achieve a high search ranking for a particular web search. This will work to an extent but a word which is repeated too often can raise a red flag with search engines and you may end up being ignored!

To try and achieve a good rankings for particular searches you should plan you post and try and include potential search terms relevant to you content, thus the reason for doing a little research using the above mentioned Keyword Selector Tool. For example a potential search term relevant for this post may be SEO (46,777 searches), get web site traffic (419 searches), internet marketing (178,835 searches), search engine optimization (117,593 searches), with how many times the term was searched for last month (I'm assuming yahoo need to update this tool as it still says January!).

Including the highest searched keyword will increase the chance of your post being reached eventually by a relevant search phrase, BUT the more a term is searched for inevitably the more competition you will be facing to get a good ranking position. For example, for the search term "how to achieve a higher search engine ranking", according to Google I would be currently competing against 1.3 million other blogs to get into the top 10, so it is POINTLESS trying to achieve this. By including particular keywords you are aiming to include your post within a catagory not to achieve high search engine rankings for a particular term as eventually you post will be found for a particular combination of these keywords.

So what have we learned so far?

By including a few various particular search terms and keywords within you posts will help toward you post being found "organically" through web searches. It is more of an art than a science as the web is constantly evolving and search algorithms are constantly being tweaked and changed. All you should be aiming to do is optimize you post, NOT by stuffing it full of as may keywords as possible. I know this sounds like I have completely contradicted myself but you must concentrate on writing good content where you can include a few relevant keywords rather than researching a bunch of keywords and trying to write a post around it.

What to aim for?

First of all "Content is King" if you write good content people will find you post, by including related keywords you are just offering a little helping hand for you post to be found and potentially linked to!

DO
Write good and relevant content.
Research your subject and competition.
Research which search terms and keywords find the most relevant posts for you (ie do a few Google searches).
Include a "few" relevant keywords and search phrases if they fit.

Dont
Stuff you articles full of the most popular keywords you find.
Rely on Overture too much, its only a guide.
Try to inset search phrases if they look out of place.
Expect to get top rankings by using all the keywords you can find!

Summary

Always aim for quality content, if you post is good enough it will be found eventually by search engines. Be subtle when including keywords and search phrases you have researched and try and make sure they flow well with the post. You are not trying to cheat the search engines as you will spend more time trying to do this than it will ever be worth, all you are aiming for is a foot in the door i.e. being included in various sub categories across one particular broader category.

As mentioned earlier this is more of an art than a science, experiment with these techniques and see what works as you will never know if you don't try it! If something isn't working then change it, it's much easier trying to change a few words and the structure of a post than it is trying to change the web!

If you enjoyed this post please feel free to buy me a gingerbread late! mmmm!