I've written before about the value of having secondary keywords alongside your main keyword (or phrase). This way you can compete with the 'big boys'.
Yesterday I mentioned Konnie Huq. If I put her name into Google my blog, as you would imagine, is nowhere in the listings - at least not on the first couple of pages. But, if you remember, I also said yesterday that my keywords alongside 'Konnie Huq' were 'low + cut + dress'.If I put 'Konnie Huq dress' into Google this blog is in on the first page, in second position. For 'Konnie Huq low cut' this blog is also on the first page.
And before anyone says that it's unlikely searches will be made with the keywords mentioned - well people have! The reason being is that the main news story yesterday in the UK, about Konnie, was because she was wearing a very low cut dress to a film premier. If she'd been out and about in jeans and a t-shirt she wouldn't have been a news story and people wouldn't have searched her name. It was the dress that was as much the news as Konnie herself. It's necessary to pick out the essence of a news story as keywords.
The above also illustrates once again, as with Kate Middleton, that if you post about hot topics you'll get extra visitors via search engines and also from Technorati tags (providing you use them, of course). It also shows how quickly you can get on Google if you do things the right way - exploit what's hot.
Moving on slightly, I would recommend that you have a tracker which shows the keywords search engines have used to send traffic to your blog. If your counter/tracker doesn't do this try eXTReMe Tracking - they list all keywords.
From this list you can then see what words are working for you. Sometimes this may be because you have written about something specific. If you see certain keywords are working, because of the subject matter of a post you have published, you can then do a follow up on the same theme. This will most likely get further search engine referrals.
The old cliche is right: Give people what they want, not what you think they want. You can judge this, to a degree, by looking at your tracker's list of keywords.
One more thing ...
About images, as per yesterdays post. Shane has left me a comment to say: 'You should use dashes instead of underscores to separate the words, since search engines don't see underscores as spaces.' He mentioned this as I wrote about how photos/images should have proper keyword titles. I gave the example of konnie_huq_low_cut_dress. According to Shane I should have used the title konnie-huq-low-cut-dress instead.
After all of this talk about low cut dresses I think it must be time to take a break. Keep an eye on those keywords!
Good luck,
Mike.
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