ProBlogger: Easy Ways for Bloggers to Use Keywords to Drive Traffic

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Easy Ways for Bloggers to Use Keywords to Drive Traffic Posted: 05 May 2015 07:12 AM PDT This is a guest contribution from Nick Rojas. The world of web promotion and search engine optimization has never been a consistent one. Constantly changing Google results algorithms compete with tricky marketers in what is essentially an arms race, with each side trying to gain a lasting advantage against the other. However, though the tools change constantly, the battleground stays the same. We're talking about keyword research. Every time a Google update levels the playing field again, it comes back to this: if you create high quality content that people read, you will gain prominence in Google results. And the best way to do this is with keyword research. We've got some great tips to help you make sure your blog has its keyword game in top form. Read on! Make a list of the most important topics that you cover on your blog One good way to conceptualize the idea of a keyword is to think backwards. What kind of people are you trying to attract? What is your ideal reader looking for? Go back through your blog entries and mentally sort them into vague lists. If you use tags or categories, this can help a lot as well. Basically, you want to create large "content buckets" that you can fit most of your posts into. Transform those content buckets into keyword lists Once you've assembled some buckets that most of your posts fit into, you can identify keywords to fill those out. These are phrases that you'd like to rank highly on the search engine results page. An example might be a blog about maternity fashion that provides some affiliate referral links to clothing stores where readers can buy the recommended clothes. This hypothetical maternity wear blog would want to rank highly on searches like "clothes to wear during pregnancy”, "maternity fashion", and other searches like this. This isn't a be all, end all list of the keywords you'll be using, but rather just to clear your mind of all the obvious ones. Get a good mix of short tail and long tail keywords Some keywords are easier (and cheaper) to rank on than others. The cheap, easy ones are long tail, and are associated with much less traffic than the short tail keywords, which are particularly popular and frequently searched. The web has tons of tools for all kinds of things, from business name generators to tools like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, which is great for this sort of thing. Use tools to get a great keyword spread Other great tools for this are Topsy and Buzzsumo. Topsy helps you uncover the confusing and convoluted work of social media keywords. Topsy is essentially the Google Trends of social media, allowing you to page through the recent history of keywords on social media to identify trends in that medium. Buzzsumo helps you make sure that your keyword list is as comprehensive as that of your competitors. It helps you analyze their sites directly, helping you to spot when a new trend in your industry or field is coming up and letting you stay on top of it. Keywords: always relevant No matter how many Google updates happen, it seems likely that keywords will remain just as relevant as they have always been. It's how people actually think and actually search for things, so barring any major sea changes in how people interact with their computers, keywords are likely to be an extremely important way to organize search and rankings. It pays to stay on top of your keywords! Nick Rojas is a business consultant and writer who lives in Los Angeles. He has consulted small and medium-sized enterprises for over twenty years. He has contributed articles to Visual.ly, Entrepreneur, and TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter @NickARojas, or you can reach him at NickAndrewRojas@gmail.com. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Easy Ways for Bloggers to Use Keywords to Drive Traffic

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ProBlogger: 3 Places Your Best Ideas Are Hiding In Your First Drafts

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3 Places Your Best Ideas Are Hiding In Your First Drafts Posted: 03 May 2015 07:00 AM PDT Many bloggers write drafts and then ‘edit’ their writing – but ‘revising’ is a little different and is definitely a good exercise. Today I came across a great short video by Beth Dunn from Hubspot that was recorded earlier in the year at the Inbound conference. In the video Beth talks about ‘fixing your writing’ by learning to ‘revise’ your work. There’s lots of take home points in this video but what resonated with me most were the three points Beth makes about the places in your first drafts that your best ideas often hide (at around the 9.30 mark). These best ideas (or the ‘screws’ or the ‘points’ as Beth calls them) are often the things that you need to pay particular attention to and that you should make the centre pieces of your revised drafts. These points regularly can be found: The Change The place in our writing where we hit a fork in the road and it changes course in some way. Some writers call this the pivot. For me in my writing I find myself regularly feeling tempted to take a tangent in my writing halfway through a post and have trained myself to take note while I writing of these moments because they are often golden moments that can trigger me to completely change what I’m writing or that lead to followup posts. The Laugh The moment while you’re writing when while you’re writing something just ‘lurches out onto the page’ and you laugh out loud and wonder where it came from. This reminds me of a post I wrote back in 2011 about ‘Listening to Your Inner Crazy Voice‘ where I identified that I’ve noticed that many times my best ideas have made me either laugh or gasp when I’ve had them. As I wrote back then: In each case, the reaction I had straight after having the idea was to either laugh or gasp. In most cases, the reaction was the same when I told those around me. I'm learning that the laugh and gasp reactions are good. They tell you that you've thought of something a little out of the box—something that will, at the very least, get noticed. The End The vast majority of your great ideas will be found at the end of your first draft. This resonated with me very strongly. I regularly find that after banging out a post that the crux of what I say is in my conclusion. This is logical in many ways – we spend a lot of time exploring an idea in our writing and after all that grappling with the topic we refine our idea to the point where they’re a lot better when we’ve finished than when we started. In some ways the first draft becomes the opportunity for us to think out loud to help us get to ‘the point’ or the idea. The mistake at this point is simply to publish what we’ve written. Rather – treat your first draft as the raw material for what comes next. Take that idea that you’ve refined and make it the centrepiece of your writing. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger 3 Places Your Best Ideas Are Hiding In Your First Drafts

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