How To Blog More Effectively Part 1: Keywords

In an effort to spark more ideas to blog about, I thought it was time I started a blogging “series” and the idea that came to mind was sharing my experiences (successes and failures) around how my blog has matured over the years and what I’ve learned.

In Part 1 of this series I thought I would talk about the often overlooked art of factoring in search when you write your blog posts.  I spent quite a bit of time in SEO & SEM in my earlier years, and I’ve definitely utilized that experience when it comes to my blogging.  There are a variety of ways to drive traffic to your blog that include social media, community engagement and link building.  But another area you should consider paying close attention to is keywords.

In most of my blog posts, I am always doing a bit of keyword research to see what phrases are searched for the most frequently, and have less competition in terms of results.  Typically I can find a handful of terms that relate to what I want to write about that hit that sweet spot of being searched for quite often, yet not too crazy on the number of results.  By properly identifying a strong term like this, and using it in your blog title and post, you can often find your blog article working it’s way up very quickly in search results.  Let’s take a look at an example of mine.

On December 28th of last year, I decided to write an article about my experience with replacing my Macbook Pro with a Macbook Air.  I had a feeling that this information would be very useful to lots of people, so I wanted to be sure to title effectively.  I used Google’s Keyword Tool to help me identify the right term to use and I landed on “MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro”.  The term was extremely relevant to my post & had a decent amount of global monthly searches. 

The net result?  That post is currently the #3 result for that term on Google simply by ensuring I used a term based on some pretty simply keyword research.  That article has also accounted for roughly 18% of all traffic to my site since being published.

To recap:

1. When crafting a blog post, be sure to use the Google Keyword Tool to identify a search term that will potentially increase search visibility to your article based on search frequency, relevancy and competition.
2. Ensure you use that exact term as part of your post title and if possible, in your blog entry.

Have you had any similar experiences?  If so, leave a comment as I’d love to hear what has worked for you.  More to come on this series!