I know a lot of you are probably thinking when is Ian going to talk about traffic. Traffic is the key to success. I want to know about traffic and how to grab them. What are Ian’s techniques to gathering traffic and ranks! Tell me!

Ok, after several emails I will start to talk about traffic generation since I am in the midst of creating the traffic for my new blog. First in this series we will talk about keywords. Keywords are very important to traffic this will attract search engines and will gather you ranks within Google, Yahoo, and all the other search engines. But first you should submit your new website/blog to the search engines. Once that is done, we can talk about key word optimization.

Keywords are the key, to search engine optimization. You must develop an understanding of what your prospects are looking for in your area of business. Keyword research is the method for doing this and a step that should be undertaken with great precision and effort.

One of the undeniable facts in keyword marketing and yet widely neglected would be relevancy. If you could pull all the targeted visitors in the world but you are not able to deliver whatever they are looking for you will never be able to convert them into sales. It’s like going into a Chinese restaurant and all they sell pizza.

A website/blog is merely a group of web pages and each web page in your web site should have it’s own set of unique keywords. Be sure to include, if at all possible, your most relevant keyword phrase in the title of each page and in the anchor text of links to that page. This will work wonders in getting your page listed and also ranking.

This is what I did, taking the titles of my content, and using specific keywords to target the search engines and readers. I try to add the keywords into my title and the first paragraphs of my introduction post. This is important (to me) because search engines will provide the first couple characters to the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). If your keywords are at the bottm it will still be scanned but not ranked into the SERP as much as a keyword phrase that is within the first paragraph.

How do I find the right Keywords?

Well here are some sites that can help you find targeted keywords.

• Google Keywords
• Overture Keyword Selector
• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion
• WordTracker Suggestion

These are the main sites that I use to research keywords. I tend not to use the popular keywords as there will be so many results your new site may end up on page 1000. I use keywords that are not search that much but are more targeted. Which is why this blog, gets most of its traffic from search engines, I usually end up first or on the first page for most of my posts. Now with the new blog creation I will tend to do just that as well (only on unique content that I write).

You have probably heard of the above tools to help you choose keywords. Again, try not to choose the top 10 keywords as the results for your page may be on the last. This would only be good once you have established anchor text rank on the internet via Google.

Once you’ve found some good keywords, you want to go into the source code for your site and add those keywords to your HTML code in the right places. The best places to put your keywords are in the title tag, H1 and H2 header tags, the description tag, and then sprinkled throughout the text on your pages. Keyword density is an important factor that the search engines take into consideration when listing pages in the search results. While you want to repeat your keywords throughout your text, you also want to be careful not to overload your pages with the same keywords.

Another keyword tactic I use is looking at my competitors keywords by just simply looking at the meta tags per article. Why per? The reason I do it per is because we as information gatherers just search for what we want. Search engines provide you results PER page and not on the home page. The home page is a general gathering of the newest information, but per page provides you the actual information you are looking for.

A more simple approach and one I have been doing but found out about its strategy recently is Long Tail Keywords.

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers.

In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

In short, Long Tail Keywords are multiple key phrases instead of generic 1 or 2 keywords. I have been using the so called long tail for quite sometimes as it provides more of a filter, in which Heather as well agrees:

It use to be that generic keywords would do the trick and bring you traffic. Hasn’t been that way for a long time. Searchers are getting a lot more savvy and smart when it comes to filtering out the crap when doing a search.

Like I stated prior in the post, try not to use the generic top 10 keywords, use the more/multiple keywords to have a better filtered traffic.

Keywords will be important when I discuss my other form of traffic generation, so stay tuned.