Drive Traffic to Your Blog With Seasonal Keyword Research

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Digital searching will drive holiday shopping this year, judging by the National Retail Federation’s latest Holiday Consumer Spending Survey. Consumers plan to do 46 percent of their shopping online, an increase from 44 percent last year, and 21.4 percent of those purchases will be made from a smartphone. Some of the hottest gift items include Star Wars remote-controlled Millennium Falcon Quads, Oster Flip Belgian Waffle Makers, Google’s Nest Cam, the nabi Jr. learning tablet and the Garmin Forerunner 220 smartwatch, according to retailer reports compiled by Flipboard.

What does this mean for bloggers? Keyword content associated with such hot items can result in increased organic traffic and user engagement. You can use seasonal keywords to promote your blog year-round by deploying a few strategic keyword research strategies. [Read more…]

4 Reasons You Don’t Get Organic Clicks

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Many people are under the impression that having a website, writing high quality content and boosting social shares will increase organic traffic to their website. With this mentality, you’re setting yourself up for disaster since you’re forgetting the fundamentals of SEO and how they relate to search engines.

get organic clicks

Many bloggers will agree that on-page and off-page SEO will dramatically improve your traffic while building your brand. If you’re not getting the results you feel you should, then you should implement these simple but effective strategies within your content. [Read more…]

95% of Bloggers Ignore This Technique & Stall: Keyword Research & Targeting

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Before any blogger or online marketer embarks on any venture that requires building content for a website, he / she will need to complete intensive market research and validation of interests, goals and passions. Going through the ropes of identifying needs in the marketplace, see what’s lacking, match the findings with passions and voila! You’ve got yourself an online business idea.

Keyword research for bloggers

However, there’s a critical technical step which needs to be taken that I don’t believe should be outsourced to any practitioner without first understanding its importance and relevance. That is keyword research. Keyword research is essentially using tools to gather data relating to what users are searching for in search engines, the volume of searches and to discover how tough the competition really is. [Read more…]

5 Little Things That Make a Big Difference in Your Blog’s SEO

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Many people start blogs because they are passionate about a topic and want to tell people about it. However, in order for a blog to be successful, we must go beyond writing about what interests us and focusing on the little things that make a big impact on SEO. Some tasks, like allowing for email subscription and verifying your blog’s URL with the major search engines, only take a few minutes but can create a huge difference in traffic, engagement, and overall growth.

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Building Links to Your Blog: Why Keyword Research + Quality Content Works

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Every great blogger should have basic SEO know-how. Without basic keyword strategy to drive traffic to your blog, a great blogger can go un-noticed. Some of the best blog posts I have ever read came from deep within the web. Most likely, rarely read before; with little to no internal and external links and a PageRank of 0. Being a good blogger simply isn’t enough. Whether you are a women’s fitness blogger or an actual SEO blogger; without basic SEO knowledge, you are like Jimi Hendrix deciding to play on the street instead of on stage. Your content will not reach an audience, and you probably will never make money doing it.

Keyword Research
This is why keyword research is so important. Google’s Keyword Tool and Keyword Spy are great ways to figure out what search terms correlate with your blog. Incorporating these keywords as links within your copy as well as your header will provide on page SEO value, reader value and (I’ll explain later) link building power.

Establishing a keyword set, doesn’t have to be a set list anymore. Targeting contextual terms should be consistent in the copy of your blog. The thought being, when somebody loves your blog post enough to share it on their site, they will include the contextual links. [Read more…]

Sunday Morning SEO: Long Tail Keyword Research With Google Analytics

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One of the things SEO specialists often talk about is the power of long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are the search terms with 3 or more words that don’t have high search volume. The shorter keywords have higher search volume but in aggregate, the long tail keywords provide the bulk of a site’s search traffic.

For example, you can have a Europe travel site that ranks well for europe travel but the majority of your traffic will come from terms like:

  • europe travel deals
  • europe travel guide
  • europe travel packages
  • europe travel books
  • cheap europe travel

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Sunday Morning SEO: Target Long Tail Keywords First

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For many bloggers, when they first get interested in SEO, they will go after the most competitive keywords first.  A web design blogger will optimize his site to target web design.  A gadget blogger will go after gadgets.  However, this is usually a bad strategy.

Short keywords like web design, gadgets, and social media are very hard to rank for.  For a new site, if you do everything right, it could take months and oftentimes years before you reach the front page of the search results.  And even then, there could be 10 other sites that do SEO better than you, so your site would be left languishing on the second page.

Now you may be happy with a second page or even a third page ranking, but most people don’t visit those pages.  Aaron Wall, a prominent search expert, writes:

There is no award, little traffic, and virtually no value for ranking on page 2 or page 3, even if it is for an exceptionally competitive and high traffic keyword like credit cards.

So, what’s a blogger to do? [Read more…]

Sunday Morning SEO: 3 Factors to Consider in Keyword Research

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Ian had a great question in a comment on my previous post. He asked:

How do you judge the balance between lots of people will be looking for that [popular keyword] against there are lots of results for that [popular keyword]?

Using your example, for “nba all star game 2009″ you’d be one of 500,000 results so how do you decide if that’s a worthwhile keyword to use?

There are couple things to consider when picking keywords to target. [Read more…]