Are keywords / key phrases useful to bloggers? #blogging

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Following up on a comment made by my friend Anita Hunt, I thought a post about Keywords and Key Phrases was in order. Then I realised that I had a whole chapter about them in the soon to be released Zero to Blogger book. Here’s an edited extract from the book.

Keys to unlocking traffic

Keywords and Keyphrases for Bloggers

In this chapter we are going to start with one of the most vital but overlooked tools of blogging – keyword research.

In this chapter you will learn

• what a keyword is
• and why your need to spend sometime looking at them – before you even write a post.
• what tools to use to for research
• what tools you can use to check out your competition.

No matter where the search takes place; keywords are how you get found.

If you want to learn who has participated in more Formula One races  than anyone else you might search by these keywords, “who has the record for the most Formula One finishes”. Or you might simply search for Formula One Trivia. These are two very different searches for the same information. To use keywords / key phrases to your advantage you have to think like your reader, what would they search to find you?

One thing you might notice, and it’s important, is the use of keywords for both searching and organisation. While it may seem that the internet is in utter chaos when it comes to organisation, the fact is this keyword system works well. As the internet grows and changes, keyword searches and indexing will grow and change too, they adapt to the human user’s needs.

“The ultimate goal of a search engine is to serve up the most relevant content to the person searching for that information.”

What Does This Mean To You As A Business Blogger?

As a business blogger, you know that in order to generate traffic to your website you need to have a presence in the search engines. You can pay for this traffic by participating in search engine advertising programs like Google’s AdSense but most businesses find good success with organic search results – by using keywords to drive very specific and qualified traffic.

This chapter is designed to help you manage the keyword process so you can find those nuggets, those golden keywords, that will drive traffic to your website and help your target audience find you.

We’ve  made it easy for you by  breaking it down into five steps.

Each step is an action step you can take today to start growing your blogs traffic and your business.

Okay, that’s a bit of a teaser to finish on…. sort of.

Here is the rest of the chapter. It’s not entirely finished, it’s not polished but it contains very useful information. If you want to download it and read it, you are more than welcome to. I think even though it’s only 99% complete you will still find it very useful for your blogging. It’s 2,500 words and 8 pages long. When completed there will be a spreadsheet to access as well as the image.  One thing Warren and I agreed on, although Zero to Blogger is a physical book our readers would get  toolkits as well so they can easily implement our knowledge.

Keywords and why you need them  right click and save as to save to your desktop.

Let me know if you find it useful, and please share this post so someone else may find it and benefit from it.

Sarah

PS Thanks also to my co-author Warren Cass for letting me share this chapter with my readers. He has a Social Media tools comparison chart to give away over on his blog,go grab that too  http://wp.me/p1fwQI-mV