Blog traffic has become one of the most desired commodities around, and a well-received website can command increased RSS numbers, higher advertising power and a niche authority that can be leveraged for big gains. Organic traffic comes primarily from three sources: direct traffic, referred traffic and search engine rankings. Understandably, we can’t control the first two very well because they rely heavily on pre-established reputations; therefore, let’s see how we can manipulate our search engine ranking positions for higher traffic to our blog.

But how do you take a blog from zero to hero? How does anyone come up on the first page of Google results anyway? It’s really got little to do with actual power, Google results are driven by linking from other authority websites… so we are going to try to exploit this for all it’s worth and land a front-page placement for our keyword phrase.

Researching Your Keyword Term

The first step in any successful keyword optimization campaign is finding that special keyword term that you think you can dominate. If you haven’t done this before, I would recommend seeking out an easier term to rank as a “trial run” of sorts. Regardless of how much competition you think that you can overcome, the process is the same.

I will be following along in this process with my targeted phrase “make money online.” This phrase is one of the most competitive in my niche, and I have been working up to the task by originally using “ways to make money online” and changing that most recently to “making money online.” I have had relative success without much of any effort, which leads me to believe that I may be able to stay competitive on this ultra-high trafficked term.

A good keyword for your blog has the following:

1. A high number of searches by the public, so you know that people are interested in learning a bit more about it
2. Low competition from other websites so that you have a chance to rank higher

This is not a post about researching keyword terms, but I will recommend a few tips and articles to get you started, and save you time. When I look at keywords, I typically start by opening up a Microsoft excel file to write down and remember all of my ideas. Google’s new Keyword Tool is my new “go to” research strategy. This thing is powerful and can get you relevant terms that show competition clearly. My other favorite is WordTracker’s Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. This one has a Google Trend analysis so you can really get a perspective on competition and ranking power.

Good Articles to Read More About Keyword SEO:

Caroline Middlebrook: Finding Good Keywords For Your Niche
CopyBlogger: Keyword Research Can Help You Make Money
SuiteJ: Using Google Analytics to Find Hidden Gems in Keywords

It is always important to realize that you are not competing against a search engine, you are competing against other websites. Knowing this, you may run across a highly “competitive” keyword, but when you actually search with it, you may feel that the top results can be beaten… and this is all that really matters.

Modifying Your Site’s Title & Description

Before we get into the actual marketing aspect of keyword optimization, you need to make sure that your website is tailor-made to house traffic from your targeted term. What exactly am I referring to? That’s right. The classic Meta tags! Now instead of coding this by hand, I recommend installing a plugin to handle this for you. WordPress is not very “SEO-friendly,” so you will probably have a heck of a time setting all the Meta tags correctly without a great plugin like All-In-One SEO or Platinum SEO.

What we do here is pretty much a no-brainer, we want a title and a description that includes our keywords somewhere inside of it! For example: since I am targeting the phrase “make money online,” the title of my website is now “Make Money Online by Turning TIme Into Cash!”

Let’s continue on with our description: “Jimvesting teaches how to make money online through stock market basics, blogging tips, get paid to take surveys, affiliate marketing tips and more!”

Changing around your Meta title and description (and keywords) is pretty much square one when you set up your blog to benefit from a keyword marketing campaign. It’s easy to do, and should always be done if you are looking to maximize your traffic and search engine ranking positions (SERPs). After all, Google looks to the title FIRST when they rank different sites on each search. I would maintain that it is the most important factor of all.

Starting The Idea Machine

Over the next few days, we are going to be doing some creative marketing techniques to fully capture traffic from search engine terms. Because of this, it’s important to realize that we are going to be writing some bum marketing articles, getting our reciprocal links out on other blogs, making a link bait page, cross-linking through social media and ensuring that we are linked back to in the most effective way possible. There are going to be a lot of ideas floating around, so start brainstorming about how you can capture the most traffic from your targeted term… this can be anything from article ideas to giveaways and incentives in order to encourage reciprocal linking.

Bottom Line: Let’s set things up and get ready to dominate our keywords! You can start the process right now by writing (or paying for) generalized 500 word articles about your niche area. Or, you can start to collect a list of websites where you currently have links or are looking for placements. We’ll get into the specifics soon, but by now you should be in position to succeed!

-Jimvesting