Remember in one of my recent posts where I said that I was really targeting the long tail keywords that were used by people to find my website? I thought I was doing a decent job of writing with keyword phrases in mind but nothing like Grizzly was teaching on his blog, How to Make Money Online With Grizzly. I really took his leasson to heart last week and went searching through the long tail keywords on my health and fitness blog. I normally do this but with the intention of getting more visitors and more keywords. I guess I never really considered the true importance of using those phrases with SEO in mind. Duh.
I pulled out a keyword phrase “how long does it take to get in shape”. It was searched for a grand total of two times but I thought I’d write a post with that in the title and bold the phrase in the content like Grizzly mentions to do, right there in the first paragraph.
It worked pretty nicely. I have no idea if more than 20 people will search on that phrase the rest of the year. I hope everyone on the Internet does, but they won’t and that’s fine. The thing is the test worked better than I imagined. Within two days my blog wound up number 4 in Google for that search term. Behind Yahoo Answers and Shape Magazine. Doubt I’ll be jumping ahead of them anytime soon. But out of 2.9 million listings that ain’t too bad for a blog post (originally the numbers were like 4.1 million but within like 5 minutes they changed for the exact same phrase to 2.9 million. Not sure what that was about). And I wouldn’t be surprised if other search terms pop up because of that post. And then I’ll have new keyword phrases to use.
I used Google Analytics to find the search term. Late this morning I decided to update a bunch of my niche Blogspot blogs and went to Nichebot and pulled out long tail keyword phrases using the “sniping” method that Courtney Tuttle talked about here. I expect good results from that exercise as well.
I am amazed sometimes at my stupidity. It’s not like I didn’t know to target these long tail keywords and use them in my titles and sprinkle them diligently throughout the article posts. And it’s not like I didn’t have the data or tools to use either. I just got to the point where I was writing shit for the sake of writing and not considering the SEO of it all. Just adding non-focused content. I’d do a keyword search at Nichebot and not fully utilize the long tail of it all and just try to find a primary word that didn’t have a lot of competition. My bad. The primary is only the start not the end. I must have read, and probably written, about that numerous times yet somehow it never clicked. Something that simple just never clicked. It’s effing clicking now.
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Weird, now when I search for that term I’m not ranked at all for that specific phrase. Like 30 minutes later. Frustrating. Not sure what’s happening with the SE but I was there and I still believe this works well.
At any rate, what I did notice in my Aweber stats was a whole bunch of new phrases very similar to the original one I mentioned in this post. New search terms that found this post. I have new phrases to target now.
I did the search and hbi.com came up #2. I think that’s your blog, because the tone of the writing sounds a lot like what’s here.
Good work!
Barry
Splork, Funny you should mention this. I’ve been reading the same blogs and started to do the same thing with regards to the SEO strategies which I believe has increased my traffic in just a few days. Amazing isn’t it!
Thanks Barry. That’s the one. I dunno why my search shows nada.
Diane, everything I’ve written in the last week on my WP, Blogspot and XSP sites are now written with getting that keyword phrase ranked #1-10 in Google. I try to find well searched, low comp phrases but if I can’t find both I’ll settle for low comp and decent search numbers. That doesn’t sound very smart on the surface but it is amazing the new batch of keywords that it generates which I can use.
Could be you forgot the quotes or made a typo.
Thanks for the tip on Courtney Tuttle – that’s a great article!
And if hbi is your site, then it came up #1 in Google for me with quotes around it.