A Simple Approach to Finding a Good Blogging Niche, Part III - Keyword Research

In the first two articles, we talked about brainstorming topics and content.  With that in place, it’s time to start doing some research and see just what the real world is like. It’s one thing to sit at home and think the world likes what you like, but it’s another thing altogether to see if there are people that actually do.

As I mentioned in the beginning, there are lots of tools and methods for doing in-depth data mining that the SEO pros use.  Eventually, you’ll also learn how to do these things, as you become more and more immersed in the world of blogging and Internet promotions.

However, to get started, we just want to do some solid basic research and know what is already happening in each niche. That will help us to know if a niche is starving, thriving, or flooded.

In order to have a successful blog or website, people have to find you. A vital part of that process is having good keywords that the search engines can match up to people’s searches.  A good keyword is one that’s fairly popular (meaning people are actually searching for it), and yet is not too flooded in competing sites.  Here’s a process that will help you find those keywords.  You’ll do this process for each of your niche ideas.

• Start with a general keyword

In our example in the last article, we used “Fishing” as a possible niche topic.  That one is probably too broad, but let’s start with it anyway.  Go to Google.com, and type that into the search bar. As you type, Google will drop down a list of similar keyword suggestions. These are popular, similar searches.  That means that these are possible keywords that people are actually searching for. Write these down. In my browser, it showed, “Fishing License Utah”, “Fishing Report”, “Fishing quotes”, and a few others. Save that list for later.

Do the search.  You might see a number close to the top that says something like “About 500,000,000 results” or some number. This indicates how many websites Google knows about that are using this keyword. It’s usually a huge number.  If you don’t see a number, but only see ads and pictures, then the number is way too high to display.

Scroll to the bottom of the page, and you’ll see another list of suggested search terms, like:

fishing youtube
fishing tips
fishing videos
fishing gear
fishing games
fishing report
bass fishing
fishing knots

• Begin narrowing

Obviously, your first, most general search will be way too broad, and will need to be narrowed.  Let’s try some more.  Click into one of the suggested searches. The first one I tried was “Fishing tips”, with “About 211,000,000 results”.  That’s better than before, but it’s still way too many websites.  I’ll need to keep looking for my keywords.

• Narrow further

Next, I clicked into “Bass Fishing”.  Right away, I saw that this one had “About 10,600,000 results”.  That sounds like a huge number, still, but in the scale of the internet, that’s actually reasonable.  This one could work.  When you find a keyword in this range, look at some of the websites in the list.  Click into them and begin exploring them.  Are they commercial sites or informational sites? What sorts of information are they sharing? If you see websites that you’d like to emulate, write down the addresses for future reference.

And always write down the keywords you’re exploring, and the numbers you find.

• Try a different branch

After you’ve played and explored some with the keywords you’ve gotten, go back and explore another “branch” of the same “tree”.  In our example, maybe I could try “fly fishing” or “angling” to see what kinds of new keywords I could generate.

After a while of this exploration and research, you’ll have a list of good possible keywords, and you’ll have a good idea of what’s happening and what’s available within the niche you’re considering.

Do this same process with each niche topic idea on your list, and you’ll have a lot of good information.  You’ll probably start to see some real trends in the niche ideas you’re exploring and you might even be starting to formulate some thoughts on which ones might be better options than others.

Still, there’s one more step to come...


This article is part of a four-part series on researching and choosing your blog niche. The other articles can be found here:

1. Introduction to finding a good blog niche
2. Brainstorming blog niche and content ideas
3. Keyword research
4. Monetization product research

Mark is currently employed as an Internet Business Coach.

Mark also has other sites and blogs, including Mark's Black Pot - Dutch Oven Recipes, MarkHansenMusic.com and his MoBoy blog.

MySpace, Facebook, Google+

I know I’m showing my age, but I used to be very active on MySpace.  Even though I was actively promoting many websites, especially my music, and I resisted the transition to Facebook.  I had figured out all the nuances of MySpace, and I didn’t want to have to relearn everything.  

But, eventually, I did.  I made the jump, and once I was in with both feet, I never looked back (I get paid extra by the cliche, you know...).  It is true there was a learning curve.  Not so much how to use it, or how to get around in it, but how to USE it.  Effectively USE it to promote my sites, I mean.  

Each social network is a different animal, and it responds to your methods differently.  There are some underlying principles, it’s true, but still, they’re NOT the same, and if you treat them that way, you’re destined to fail.

So, today, I read an article about the ascendence of Google+, and my first thought was, “Oh, no, not again...”  Now I’m going to have to work both Facebook AND Google+ for a while, and I’ll have to learn it and figure it all out.  I wasn’t looking forward to it.

Still, I jumped in.  I’ve had a Google+ account for a long time, I just haven’t been using it.  I spent some time this afternoon tweaking my profile, finding some friends, and joining a few groups.  I’m not being too active just yet, as I want to discover the lay of the land (more cliches) and watch for a bit first.

There are a few things I like, like the circles, and how easy it was to organize my friends into them.  There are some similarities, like the posting feed.  The more I read, the more I’m convinced that the secret to the future of SEO will be tied into how many +1’s you rack up, so the more I learn about it now, the better off I’ll be.  

I don’t like splitting my time between many social networks.  I don’t like posting the same thing, essentially, on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.  I imagine there’s a lot of crossover in my audiences.  For now, however, I don’t see any other way.

Some bonus thoughts:

1 - I thought it was really interesting that by a total saturation percentage, MySpace (such as it still is) actually beats out Pinterest!

2 - Google owns both Google+ AND YouTube, but added together, they're still just under Facebook!



Mark is currently in the curriculum Department of an internet and SEO training company.

Mark also has other sites and blogs, including Mark's Black Pot - Dutch Oven Recipes, MarkHansenMusic.com and his MoBoy blog.

Guest Blogging to Increase Website Traffic

The holy grail of inbound links is an in-content text link where the link text contains one of your strong keywords.  This can be a bit challenging to get set up, because that usually means that someone else has to set it up on their site.  That means that someone else has to like something on your site so much that they take up valuable space on their site or blog talking about you, and linking to you.

This happens, and it’s great when it does.  Really, the only thing you can do to make it happen, however, is by having something really incredible at your website, and then hoping people find it, like it, and link to it.  It’s not practical to say, “Today I’m gonna go get someone to link to me!”

There is, however, a great way to establish these kinds of links and increase website traffic.  To do it, you have to approach other sites, particularly blogs, with the idea that you’re going to give them something they need:  Good content.  You’re going to offer them a “Guest Post.”  In other words, you’ll write a blog post for them to post on their blog.  In the process of doing that, you can establish a link to your website. 

This isn’t anything sneaky.  This is an accepted part of the exchange.  If I’m a blogger, and you provide good content for me, I’m going to allow you to establish a link and increase website traffic to your site as a return of the favor.

Here are some examples of some of my guest posts, designed to promote my Dutch oven cooking blog, marksblackpot.com.  This one, about Dutch oven cooking in the cold, actually contains many internal links.

This one isn’t really about Dutch ovens, but it is about food, so it fit.  I also used it to promote my Utah religious pop culture blog. 

Guesting on Other People’s Blogs

How do you do it?

First of all, read a lot of blogs in your niche.  Find out who are the best, most respected, most trafficed, and most famous bloggers.  Any other relevant blog will do, but the best ones will get you the most traffic. 

As you find these blogs, read a lot of their posts, with the comments, so you get an idea of their point of view and how their audience responds.  Think of a topic that would be good for their blog and good for their audience.  Then, write up a short 3-4 sentence teaser or outline of your topic idea. 

Then you’ll want to contact the blogger and propose your article.  Usually, there will be some kind of email link on the blog, but you might just have to use the comment space of one of their postings.  If you do that, try to pick one that’s about a similar topic.  Tell the hosting blogger that you have an article about such and such a topic, and give them the teaser.  Would they like it as a guest post?  Make sure to leave an email address for them to contact you back, and make sure the comment link (if you’re doing it that way) points back to your blog or site.

Sometimes, the bloggers themselves will put out calls for guest posts.  If you see those, make a note of it, and submit an article or an idea more directly.

If they respond favorably, then write the article, proof it, making sure that it contains good keywords and links.  DO NOT put any affiliate links in the article.  Let the hosting blogger do that if he or she wants to.

Finally, email it to the hosting blogger.  If they like it, they’ll post it, and you’ll both get the benefit.  You’ve helped them with good content, they’ve helped you with a quality link that will be in front of lots of their viewers.

Getting Guests on Your Own Blog

A great way to get started with this of increasing website trafficis to seek out some guest posts for your own blog.  If you’re nervous about contacting established bloggers and feeling like a beggar at their doorstep asking for handouts, then ask them to write a guest post for your blog first.

The contact will still be the same.  The only difference is that you’ll be asking for content instead of pitching it.  If you have an idea for a topic, suggest it, but allow them to come up with their own posts as well.

The Illogical Extreme

As I got to thinking about this, it occurred to me that you could create a blog, write a few posts of pillar content, and then recruit other writers to guest post.  The entire blog could be nothing but guest posts about a relevant topic! 

Interesting...





Mark is currently in the curriculum Department of an internet and SEO training company.

Mark also has other sites and blogs, including Mark's Black Pot - Dutch Oven Recipes, MarkHansenMusic.com and his MoBoy blog.

Panda Eats Up Lame Content and Spits it Out!

Some more thoughts on the value of valuable content:

For a long time, one of the biggest promotional strategies of the ‘net has been to establish lots of “content-based” links by writing an article and submitting it to hundreds of article directories, each one with a link to your website.

There were several problems with this.  One was that often these “articles” were thinly-veiled sales letters.  For example, if a website was all about baby strollers, the marketer might pick a few featured items, grind out 500 words about the features of those particular strollers, title it something like, “How to shop for a baby stroller”, and off it goes to the directories.  Or, it might have a brief overview of what, in general, makes up a baby stroller, with a few keywords.  

There was little in these, or most other articles that was truly informative or inspiring. If you check the table in my last post about internet content, these articles would go in the “lame” box in the lower right.

These are web pages that end up as what some people call “flotsam and netsam”.  These are pages that are mere clutter that clog up the ‘net and make it that much harder for people to find the real information that they’re wanting.

So, last spring, Google revised their ranking algorithm in an update referred to as “Panda”.  A lot of those marketers that had relied on their copied and spun articles with linkbacks found their rankings plummeting.  Those that relied on automatically generated content pulled with searches of keywords and scraped and copied text found that their sites had disappeared from top slots in Google’s search engine results pages.

Here are just a couple of good, informative updates on the subject:

• How Does the Panda/Farmer Update Impact Affiliates?
• Lessons Learned at SMX West: Google’s Panda Update, White Hat Cloaking & Link Building

What this all boils down to is that Google is, once again, establishing content as king.  Good, useful, informative content, that is.  One by one, the quick, easy ways to magical Internet ranking and wealth are disappearing (if they ever existed in the first place), and steady, real, honest writing is winning the day.

Here are some ways to get good ranking and good traffic:

• Write (or pay good writers to write) good content for your websites.  This is true both of blogs and of ecommerce, products-based websites.
• Write good content for external sites, like reputable articles directories and content sites (ezinearticles.com, squidoo.com, hubpages.com).
• Make good sensible comments on other people’s good content (in blogs or other discussion sites.  Even if the links are no-follow, it will help establish your credibility and attract directly clicking traffic.
• Submit good content to other people’s blogs as guest posts.
• Make a good, useful blog yourself.
• Use social networks like twitter and facebook wisely, to draw viewers and generate real buzz.
• In affiliate marketing, give people more content than ads, rather than the other way around.
• Make all of your writing and content rich in good keywords that are not already flooded in the marketplace.

These are the ways to make your site the most attractive and useful to visitors, and to make it more respected and ranked by the search engines.

Mark is currently in the curriculum Department of an internet and SEO training company.

Mark also has other sites and blogs, including Mark's Black Pot - Dutch Oven Recipes, MarkHansenMusic.com and his MoBoy blog.

How to Use Google Queries to Find Backlink-Friendly Sites

A while ago, I was out cruisin' the blogosphere's main drag, and found another helpful post. This one talked about how to establish quality backlinks.  Much of the posting talked about some pretty typical ideas, like writing and posting good articles, and posting blog comments, etc...  These strategies are pretty well-known.  However, one thing about this article that most other postings have ignored is just how to find the best sites to place your links. 

The genius of this article is in using very specific Google searches to find these sites.  Some of these search strategies kinda fall in the realm of "Power Searching" on Google because they involve more than just typing in words and hoping to get good hits.  We'll talk about these as we get through them.

Directories, Lists, and Vertical Portals

It's important to get your site listed in Directories, especially topic-specific ones (especially vertical portals).  But how do you find them?  Well, it turns out that there are some common factors that these pages all seem to have, and you can use that in your searches to get straight to them.

First pick one of your keyword phrases.  The first part of the search will be that phrase included in quotations (yes, you'll use the quotations in the Google search bar).  Like this:

"outdoor cooking"

This will tell google to search for sites that contain an exact match for the words "outdoor cooking".  If a site has the word "outdoor" and "cooking" but they're apart, in different sentences, for example, then the site won't come up in the results list.

Then, after a space, type a plus sign (+), like this:

“outdoor cooking” +

This tells Google that you want to include something else in the search criteria.

After another space, type: “add url” (and include the quotations), like this:

“outdoor cooking” + “add url”

Google will return only web pages that include both the exact phrase, "outdoor cooking" AND the exact phrase "add url", but they don't have to be right next to each other in the page.  See, most directories, lists, and vertical portals include the phrase, "add url".  But we don't want EVERY directory and portal, just the ones about outdoor cooking, so we include that, as well, in the search.

Here are some other searches that will bring up directories, lists, and portals (use your own keyword phrases in place of the words "Keyword phrase" and remember to include the quotation marks):


“Keyword phrase” + “add site”
“Keyword phrase” +  “add website”

Another trick involves Squidoo.com and their system of establishing lists.  Go to Google and do this search:

“add+to+this+list”+”keyword phrase”+site:squidoo.com

This search query will pull up a list of Squidoo.com pages (many with good pageranks) that allow you to add your site to their list, and, in many cases, even choose your own link text.

Using these searches can save you a lot of time in the most labor intensive part of your linking campaigns, that is: finding the kinds of sites you want to use. 

Mark is currently in the curriculum Department of an internet and SEO training company. Mark also has other sites and blogs, including Mark's Black Pot - Dutch Oven Recipes, MarkHansenMusic.com and his MoBoy blog.

This Years Hottest Ranking Factors

-Or-

Not Exactly the Billboard Charts


Every two years, SEOMoz.com polls some of the top search engine optimization practitioners and gurus and asks them, "What can you do to get ranked?"  They come back with all of the various factors that they have found to be most and least impactful on search engine ranking.  That data is all compiled and sorted, and presented to you at their site, as a guide to overall value in search engine optimization.

Now, this is absolutely incredibly vital information!  This tells us what to put our best efforts into, what to merely pay attention to, and what we can pretty much ignore altogether.

Keep in mind that these are the opinions of those professionals that are out on the field playing the game, but not pronouncements from those that are making the rules.  Google, Bing, and Yahoo don't come out and reveal their ranking algorithms.  They give guidelines, and leave it up to the rest of us to figure out what the details are.

Still, when a lot of really smart people with a lot of experience put their heads together and give their opinions, I'm gonna recommend that we all shut up and listen!

I looked over the various factors in several categories, and I noticed that many of them overlapped.  For quick simplicity, I merged the categories, and created a list of the most critical overall ranking factors.

• External link popularity - The best links to boost your ranking are:
• Inbound links
• From diverse domains (many other unique websites)
• From websites with authority in your area
• From other relevant websites
• Using keywords in the text they use to link to you.
• Keyword use anywhere in the title tag - Many of the responses added that having a keyword match as the first word of a title tag was also very significant.
• Having a valuable website - This is determined based on a lot of factors, including:
• Unique, substantial content on the page
• A high Google Page Rank
• A high "TrustRank"
• Keyword use in the URL - Especially in the root domain name (eg. "keyword.com").
• Having internal links (from other pages in your site) that contain keywords.
• Having a steady growth in your inbound links, rather than a sudden influx of many links.
• How recently the page was created or updated.
• Keyword use anywhere in the H1 headline tag.
• Keyword use in internal link text on the page.

There are some surprises.  For example, for many years, people have talked about the possibility of the "Age Rank", that is, Google giving preference to domains that have existed longer.  That didn't appear in the list this time.  In fact, it appears that some preference is being given to the freshest content.

Also, some gurus have long dismissed the Google Page Rank as a factor, but it's still in the list, so many others still believe it has value.

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter didn't appear to have that strong of an impact on search engine ranking.  However, most gurus seem to think their value is in more direct promotions and immediate clicks, rather than any search engine boost.

The META tags are pretty much ignored, however, the META description is still often used as the descriptive snippet in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).  So, having a good strong and attractive description can still help convince browsers to click on your link, instead of one that even ranks a step or two higher.

I'd encourage you to study the survey in detail, and begin to understand each unique element that combines to give your website the best possible chance for success!


Mark is currently in the curriculum Department of an internet and SEO training company. Mark also has other sites and blogs, including Mark's Black Pot - Dutch Oven Recipes, MarkHansenMusic.com and his MoBoy blog.

Do's and Do Not's of Social Networking

We can tell you to click here and click there, fill out this form and make a post over at that other website, but it's often not easy to truly understand what's going on in Social Networking.  It's true that a lot of the flavor of a meal is discovered while you're eating it.  In other words, you'll learn a lot about using social networks simply by being on them.  Still, here are some general guidelines of how to approach them so that you'll do better right from the start.

Do These Things:

1. Find your audience - Using your keywords to search through profiles helps filter out a lot of people who have no interest in your business or your products.  Spend your time and efforts on people who are more likely to buy.
   
2. Actively participate - Find your audience, and interact with them.  Before you know it, they'll be checking out your website and making you money.  But first, just join the party.  If you sit quietly in the corner and watch, nothing will happen.
3. Share good content, not just your own - If you're at a party, and someone is monopolizing the conversation, talking only about themselves and their own accomplishments, it gets pretty old pretty fast, doesn't it?  Share some links and info about other, still relevant, sites you've found, and people will like following you.
   
4. Be a source of value - Along the same lines, if they can count on you for the good stuff, the useful info, and the exciting news, then they'll be excited to see something you've posted.
   
5. Use the same avatar - From one social network to another, it's a good idea to use the same avatar or profile image.  This is a part of your branding efforts.  Use your company logo, if it works as a small image.  People will begin to recognize you.  (One time at church someone came up to me and said, "Hey, I saw you out on the 'net the other day.  Man, you are EVERYwhere!")
6. Update your site and blog, so you have something to talk about on the 'network.
   

Don't Do These Things:

1. Don't just plug your products - It's OK to mention your own products and your own blogs every once in a while, but if your twitter feed or your facebook page is nothing but ads, I'm going to unfollow you fast.  Visit with me, don't just sell to me.
   
2. Don't use tools to add millions of friends/followers - I recently tried a tool that got me thousands of twitter followers overnight.  Most of them were clogging my twitter feed with ads for diet pills and cheap mortgages.  When I posted about new blog entry, I got a couple of dozen hits from twitter.  Pretty lame percentage out of thousands of followers.  I've seen other things like this happen all the time.  Quantity is great, as long as it's a high quantity of good quality friends and followers.  Remember: find your audience!
   
3. Don't spew out flow - Some people want to post every detail of their personal existence.  I don't care if you're in a Starbucks having a mocha venti grande.  I also don't care to read about how long it took you to get to work this morning.  Unless you make it relevant to your topic, leave it out.  I don't mind if a part of your social networking posts are personal.  That's what shows you're human.  But don't just share the mind-numbing dullness of your dreary life.
   
4. Don't friend everyone - Not everyone is your audience, and not everyone is interested in your products.  Don't waste your time on people that won't buy.  If someone friends you and you can tell they're just looking for a bigger list, you don't have to friend them back.
   
5. Don't use the same accounts for personal networking and business networking - The more I work this, the more I realize it's much more effective to split them into separate accounts. 
   
6. Don't post too much - There's a guy on my Facebook friends list that shares good, informative content.  That's great, right?  Except he posts every 10 to 20 minutes.  I don't have time to read all that, and it clutters up my profile.  Even good content, 5-10 times a day, can get annoying.
7. Don't post too little - You're easy to forget, and if you wait too many days in between blog posts, or Twitter tweets, it's tough to build up an audience of readers.

Like I said before, as you use the social networks, you'll learn more and more how to make it effective for you.  There are many more tips and tricks that you'll pick up along the way.  Many of the tips that I learned were shared with me by other users!  Keep learning and you'll do well!


Mark is currently in the curriculum Department of an internet and SEO training company. Mark also has other sites and blogs, including Mark's Black Pot - Dutch Oven Recipes, MarkHansenMusic.com and his MoBoy blog.

Whither the keywords META?

Search engine gurus have been proclaiming for some time that the use of the META keywords tag is pointless. Fewer and fewer search engines are paying any attention to it at all, they said.

Here's the history of it: Back in the day, when search engines were new, and directories like Yahoo ruled supreme, the keywords META tag was the be-all, end-all of search marketing. You had to have the right keywords in your tag, and you repeated them a lot.

Sadly, as soon as you get something good, someone figures out how to abuse it. People who wanted to "game the system" started including many, multiple instances of keywords and keyword phrases into their keywords META tag. Sadly, the pornographers were among the first to engage this one. It got to be like an arms race. "Oh, I see you've included "sex" 100 times in your tag! I'll include it 300 times in mine!" It got to be absurd.

Not long after that, they also started including irrelevant words in their keywords META tags. Sites started appearing in searches and leaving the searchers heads scratching. "How did THAT get there?" There was a time in the early 90's where you couldn't do a search for ANYTHING, it seemed, with out at least one naughty site appearing in the list.

Well, it's no surprise that the search engines realized that this wasn't gonna work. Searchers were starting to mistrust the results they were getting.

Google came along and started indexing the results based on the words that were visible in the text, and valuing the sites based on how many inbound links a site was getting. Before long, other search engines were starting to devalue the keywords META tag.

Last week, Yahoo, the longest holdout, announced that they no longer valued the keywords META tag in the search results. After a short test, and a clarification, it's now pretty safe to say that the keywords META tag is pretty much useless in search engine optimization. Yahoo no longer uses it. Bing.com says they don't use it. Google never did.

So, what good is it?

I, personally, still find some value in it. I work a lot of websites. Blogs, commercial sites, etc... It's not easy to remember and keep track of exactly which keywords I want to focus on when I'm editing and updating each individual page. If I put the keywords that I've researched to be strong in the META tag for that page, I have a valuable reference. I can look them up and remember what they are, and my edits and my tweaks will always be centered around those words.

Silly reason, you say? Well, I can't count how many times I've used this handy reference. Having some words in the tag doesn't hurt your ranking, even if it's not helping.

To recap, then:

The key to on-site search engine optimization is to use your keywords in the right places. Currently, those are:

• The page title tag
• The domain name and/or the URL
• The visible text of the website
• The page-to-page linking within your site
• The description META tag
  
• The ALT text attributes of your images

The key to off-site optimization has always been quality links from other sites and pages.

Go to it!


Mark also has other sites and blogs, including Mark's Black Pot - Dutch Oven Recipes, MarkHansenMusic.com and his MoBoy blog.

Keyword Analysis Research

Remember all that niche and keyword analysis research you did? Well, once you've did that at the start, you're done, right? You'll never have to do that again, right? It's all over, right?

Wrong.

It turns out that I'm constantly doing keyword analysis research. Let's talk about that, about why you want to do ongoing research, and about when you'll want to do it again. And again. And again.

First of all, let's clarify what we're really researching and analyzing, here. It's all about keywords. When you were trying to determine what to sell or promote from your site, you wanted to know if a product was a good one or not. You wanted to know if it was potentially viable in the marketplace. You might have thought you were testing your products or your niche, but in reality, you were looking to see if there were any viable keywords that related to that product or niche.

Let's go through the thought process:

1. I have an idea of what to sell: Left-handed wind shifters
2. I know that I'm going to create a site to sell the left-handed wind shifters, and that I'm going to have to promote that site.
3. To promote it effectively, I want to know if there are search terms (keywords) that are in demand, but not flooded in competiton.
4. If I can't find keywords that I can effectively use to promote, then maybe the niche itself is too narrow, too unknown, too obscure. Or, it could be too big, too broad, too crowded of a market. It's best for me to think of something else.

See? You're really researching keywords.

So, here are some times to do keyword analysis research that relate to your website:

1 - Keyword Checkup

Things shift, things change. That's the one thing that you can count on as a constant on the 'net. So, keywords that you thought were great when you started might not be the best ones six months or a year later.

A personal example: On one of my blogs, I had researched some keywords when I started, and I found that "Dutch Oven Cooking" was a good keyword. About a year later, I was revisiting my keywords and discovered that "Dutch Oven Recipes" was a stronger keyword, by the numbers. I was getting good ranking as it was, and I wasn't sure I should re-optimize. In the end, I did. My traffic and my AdSense revenues have multiplied five-fold since then.

2 - Blog entries, articles

Every time I write a blog article, when I'm done, I take a quick moment. I think of keywords that would be of interest to people searching for that kind of content. I jump in and do some quick keyword analysis research and find out how good they are, and which ones are the strongest. Then, I go back and rewrite a few sentences of the article so that they contain more of those keywords.

I did it while writing this article. Why do you think you're seeing "keyword analysis research" over and over? Oops, there it is again...

3 - Expanding a niche

Let's say that your website is about selling baseball memorabilia. You've been doing a good business with it, and you're established with good rankings. If you're thinking about expanding into football items, that would be a good time to research the keywords that relate to football.

4 - A whole new website

Let's carry on with the same example of the sports memorabilia site. If it's going well, and things are smooth, maybe you might want to expand in a totally different area. Maybe you want to sell cosmetics, or car parts. Those are so different from sports memorabilia that you'd really have to set up a second site, or even a third, to do both. So, when you're starting from scratch, you'll want to research from scratch as well. Time for more keyword analysis research.

The bottom line is that you'll want to be constantly exploring your keywords. If you do keyword analysis research enough, you'll find that it's very easy and you can get a good idea in just a few minutes instead of hours.

Then you can keep expanding and growing.



Mark also has other sites and blogs, including Mark's Black Pot - Dutch Oven Recipes, MarkHansenMusic.com and his MoBoy blog.

Mark's other blog posts: Save the Lawyer! A Book of Mormon Story, A Birthday Dutch Oven Gathering