Each day I get quite a few questions from new bloggers. I find it interesting that most people only want to learn about blog promotion methods, and don’t really care that much about learning to create a more useful and interesting blog. I really believe that in order to achieve success with blogging, you have to create a blog that stands out by offering a really good service, or plenty of valuable information. This is the first step, and if you’re not providing a good service, you won’t ever get there.

That said, let’s talk about getting some valuable traffic to your blog. The internet functions on keywords. If you’re like everyone else, when looking for something you go to Google and search for some words. You might search for cell phones, or blog promotion, or Courtney Tuttle - I highly doubt that you search for that The internet as we know it works on words! These words you search for are called keywords in the internet marketing world.

2 Terms You Should Know

Keyword - This is a term used to describe a word that you use when you’re searching in Google and other search engines. You may search for phone, apples, pizza, cigars; you’re going to type in the word you’re trying to find information about.

Keyword Phrase - A keyword phrase is a group of keywords that you search for. Examples of keyword phrases include: motorola cell phones, logo design, free haircut tips, free pet food. Obviously, keyword phrases have more than one word. One thing you should know is that many people online use the term ‘keywords’ to describe both keywords and keyword phrases.

!Important Concept Most People Don’t Get!

Google ranks each keyword and keyword phrase independently of all of the others! The results that come back for the keyword phrase “motorola cell phone” are totally different than the results that come back for the keyword “motorola cell phones”, even though those keyword phrases are really the exact same thing.

Most people think that if they get to #1 in Google, they can retire forever. What they don’t really understand is that some keywords are searched for a ton, and some aren’t searched for at all. If you search for Courtney Tuttle in Google, you’ll find me there in the first spot, but I only get about one hit per day from that ranking. If I were ranked in that spot for a keyword or keyword phrase that was searched for a lot, I may get thousands of hits per day from it.

!How To Find Keywords!

There is a site that I would recommend using for this. The site is Wordtracker.com. Go ahead and click the link, it will open Wordtracker in a new window for you.

What Wordtracker Does

Wordtracker helps you to find keywords. They can tell you how many times keywords are searched for every month, and they can also tell you how much competition you will have depending on which keyword or keyword phrase you decide to use.

Why Do I Care About That?

Most people ask me why they should care about how much competition they have for a keyword. The answer is found in this simple example: Do you think it would be easier to climb to the top of a ladder with 10 rungs, or a ladder with 63,000,000 rungs? I don’t even have to answer that one.

If you think that it will be easy to climb to the top of a list of 63,000,000 sites, choose a keyword like cell phones. Best of luck to you, you’re going to need it!

I hope you can see that it would be much easier to get to the top of a smaller list, and this is why you want to choose keywords that aren’t as competitive. I hope I don’t have to explain why you also want keywords that are searched for a lot.

What You Should Know So Far

• What A Keyword Is
• What A Keyword Phrase Is
• That Google, Yahoo, and MSN Rank Each Keyword Independently
• That You Want To Get Ranked For Keywords
• That You Want To Choose Keywords That Get Searched For A Lot
• That You Want Keywords With Limited Competition
• That Wordtracker Is Where You Should Go To Find Keywords

Using Wordtracker

Go to WordTracker.com. Once you get there you will look for a link that says, “Take a free trial.” Click the link. You will then see a screen where you need to put in your name and email address. After you’ve done that, click the button that says start the trial. You will then see a screen that will tell you to check your email. Check your email!

You should have an email from Wordtracker, and in that email you will see a link that you will need to click. This link activates your trial. Click the link, and then you will be taken back to Wordtracker and you will see a screen that says, “Welcome to the Wordtracker trial.” On that screen Wordtracker describes what their service does:

1. You enter a term that describes your business or service. We’ll find you as many related keywords as possible.

2. You’ll find out whether people actually search for these keywords.

3. E-mail, print or refine your selection.

4. Find out how many other people are competing for your keywords in Altavista.

At the bottom of the page, you will find a link that says, “Click here to start the trial.” Go ahead and click that, and you will then be to step 1.

What Happens in Step 1?

Step 1 is where you enter terms related to your site. Wordtracker will take the terms you enter, and will search for keywords that are related to them. It’s good to know what people are searching for, so this step is quite useful.

If your site is about cell phones, you will enter cell phones. If your site is about kids, you will enter kids, or children. If your site is about pets, you will enter pets, or dogs, or cats. Once you have entered a word or phrase that is related to your site, you will click the button that says, “Proceed.”

For the purpose of this example, I’m going to enter the word, “blogging.” Ok, I typed the word “blogging” and then clicked proceed. After about 30 seconds, Wordtracker finished their searching and then it came up and said, “Finished, please scroll down…” When I scrolled down, I could see a list of related words that Wordtracker has found. I am now at step 2.

What Happens in Step 2?

In step 2, Wordtracker helps you to find tons of words that are related to your site. You should now have a list of about 15 terms, and Wordtracker is going to help you expand those terms in this step. The first term on the list should be the term you entered. For this example, I used blogging, so blogging is the first on the list. When you click any word on the list, Wordtracker will display keywords that are related, on the right side of the screen. The keywords will be displayed in a box that looks like this:

As you can see, there are some keywords related to blogging. These are keywords that people actually search for everyday.

Not All Keywords Are Created Equal

As you can see, the keywords have numbers by them. I don’t want you to worry about the numbers in this step because the numbers that you get in the next few steps give you more information.

In this step, you want to click (with your mouse) each keyword that is related to your site. For this example, I’m going to click the following: blogging, what is blogging, free blogging, blogging for money, blogging site, blogging advice, blogging guides, career building blogging, and make money blogging. Hopefully you can see that all of these keywords are related to my blog’s subject matter.

Wordtracker remembers which words you have clicked on. Once you have clicked on the ones related to your site, you will look for a link found in the bottom right of the screen that says, “Click here for step 3.” Go ahead and click that link. You will then be taken to step 3.

What Happens in Step 3?

Step 3 allows you to remove any keywords you clicked on by accident. If you are happy with your list, go onto the next step. If you want to remove any, you will see a link next to each word that says, “Delete.” If you click delete next to a word, Wordtracker will remove it. Once you have removed the words you don’t want, if any, you will click the link that says, “Click here for step 4.” You are now on step 4.

What Happens in Step 4?

Step 4 is where you find out how good your words are. You will see a chart that give analysis of each keyword on your list. The chart will look like this:

When looking at the chart, you want to pay special attention to the 24Hrs and Competing columns. These are the 2 attributes that you will use to distinguish the good keywords from the bad. The 24Hrs column tells you how many times each keyword has been searched for in the last 24 hours, and the competing column tells you how much competition you would have if you used that particular keyword.

24Hrs Column

Wordtracker says that the keyword “what is blogging” is searched for 12 times every 24 hours. Wordtracker uses the MSN search engine for this data. Keep in mind that MSN only accounts for 9% of total searches. This means that “what is blogging” is probably searched for over 120 times per day. You can multiply each keyword by 10 to get a more accurate idea of how much they’re searched for.

Competing Column

The competing column shows you how many pages on the internet contain that keyword. Many people think that it shows how many sites contain the word, but they’re wrong. One website might have 100 pages that all contain the keyword, and each of those 100 pages would count. You don’t want to compete with too many pages, or you won’t ever get to the top of the list!

I would recommend only going after keywords that have less than 100,000 in the competing column, unless you are a well-established blog. If you don’t know whether you’re well-established or not, you’re not! If you are a brand new blog or site, I would only go after keywords that have less than 50,000 competing pages.

Go ahead and choose your keywords! Remember to use keywords that have over 10 in 24Hrs and less than 100,000 in competing.

Once you have chosen your keywords, you have some new material to write about! With this search, I found the keyword “what is blogging”. You can be sure that I will be writing a post with that title soon. I would write a post for each keyword you want to integrate.

Here are some examples of posts I’ve written to target specific keywords (these posts are found on sites that are also mine):

Motorola Krzr K3 Features

Motorola Logo Design

Blackberry Pearl Specs

In order to write a good post about a keyword, you have to assume that your reader doesn’t know what that word means. When I wrote the post about “Blackberry Pearl Specs”, I assumed that my readers had never heard of that phone before. I tell my readers what it is, and then show the specs. If someone searched for “Blackberry Pearl Specs”, they want to find the specs! That’s what they’d find. This is one of the most basic concepts of search engine marketing: Give users exactly what you think they’re looking for.

The more keywords you can integrate into your site, the more you will be found! Go get ‘em.

Since this is a longer lesson, I’m sure that some of you will have questions. Please feel free to leave them in the comments, I would be more than happy to answer them!

Tags: blogging, blog, wordtracker, keywords, keyword research, internet marketing, search engine marketing