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How to Boost Traffic to Your Blog:Keyword Research

While search engine optimization is common to web masters, few bloggers are applying this technique. To help bloggers apply search engine optimization to their blog, this article which is part 1 of 4 parts series,explains how to perform keyword research for bloggers.

How to use keyword research as traffic building method?
If you are serious to make money from blog, you must think about keyword before you write. And use that keyword repeatedly (more frequently than your high school English grammar teacher would say "it's a good English.") in your blog.
Why you have to use a keyword?
Using keyword in your blog is one of powerful ways to bring traffic to your blog. Why? It's simple. People search using keywords to look for information. If your blog includes those keywords, they will find your blog from the search engine result page and will come to you to find the information they were looking for. But is that really simple like that? Not exactly. Two things must be considered.
  • The keyword you're using must be related to your blog topic. When you're blogging about 'racing car' for example, if you use 'basketball' as a keyword, it won't help you bring the traffic. Moreover, if the visitor came to you to find information about 'basketball', he will leave your blog having bad impression on you because he couldn't get any relevant information from your blog.
    So, the rule number 1 is to use the keyword related to your topic.
  • Suppose you discovered high demand keyword (a keyword many people uses) related to your blog topic, does using that keyword guarantee you a lot of traffic? What if many bloggers are talking about similar topic using that keyword? If so, although many searchers use that keyword, probably they'll go to other bloggers who are ranked more highly in the search engine than you.
    The point is that you have to find the keyword that has high demand but a few supply. In other word, you have to find 'niche keyword.'
How to find the 'niche keyword'?
It's two fold. First, find the demand and then the supply.
How to find the demand of the keyword?
  • Use a keyword search tool. I found Search It is handy and best of it's free. A con is that an additional promotion page provided by SBI (Site Build It) will be open. But you can close it and that doesn't harm you from using search tool, Search It.
    Here is a short introduction on how to use "Search It!"
    Once you get through Search It, you will see Search It! window which has 4 boxes. Suppose you want to talk about 'car',
    • choose 'Brainstorming' at step 1 box in the "Search It" window,
    • choose 'overture suggestion' at step 2 box
    • type 'car' (without quote) at step 3 box
    • click 'Search It!'


      button (you may notice that there is step 4, but you don't need to fill it at this stage. If you try write something the program will tell you that you don't need to choose at this time.)
    • then a leading page will be open, which explains the technique you are using. Click 'Please .....results.' link to see the result.
    • the resulting page looks something like,
      Count SearchTerm
      3467549 car
      1914166 car insurance
    • You see the number in Count column? That's the demand of the keyword.
    • You also notice that other search terms are shown in the result page. Save this keywords and count somewhere, in case you have to refer it later.
    How to know the supply of the keyword?
    • For this end, you don't need any other tools. Just go to Google, Yahoo or whatever search engine you like and type car in the search box.
    • Look upper right bar of the search result page and you can find something like "Results 1 - 10 of about 301,000,000 for ''car". The number '301,000,000' is the approximated number of supply. For sure, not all of them are blog, but realize that if you talk about car you're just 1 out of 301,000,000. This means that you may not pick up "car" as your keyword and choose other topic if you want many visitors to find your blog from the search engine. This is why you need to save above demand table somewhere.
    • Now that you know the topic "car" is too competitive, the next thing you can do is to find the number of supply for other keywords from the table you saved. Continue this step until you find less competitive keywords.
    You may choose several keywords and use them in your blog. But remember that if you post a short blog, it's better to focus on only one keyword. If it's long, you may choose primary and secondary keyword.
    To sum up,
    • Use Search It to find reasonable demand of the keyword related to your blog.
    • Check the number of supply from a search engine, for example, Google.
    • Choose the keywords that have high demand and low supply.
    • Finally use that keyword in your blog repeatedly with the frequency of a bit more than your high school English teacher would tell you.
    You may want to know how to write so that you can increase traffic, which is the topic of how to boost traffic to your blog: part 2. You can read it at Traffic to Blog:Part 2.

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Ryen Kim is an MBA, specialized in marketing research and analysis. His current focus is blogging and home based affiliate business as a work-at-home scheme. He is a founder of Blog Sites and running Hom Based Affiliate Business web site.