The great temptation in Search Engine Optimization is to spend so much time tweaking keywords for the your adsense campaign that you forget to write something that someone will want to read. Look for keywords on Google Adwords:Keyword Tool, this is a great time sink once you are hooked on looking for keywords. Keyword discovery is fun and it is easy enough to pack in the ad words that you want to be featured. But search engine optimization means getting more people to your site, mainly by getting a higher page rank on a search engine. You can use Adwords to buy a higher spot, and that will get more traffic to your site. But that kind of search engine advertising can be expensive for small timers, like bloggers without too many readers. Of course, you do the promotion to get more readers.
The best advise is still to write about something you care about, sprinkle as many keywords on your subject as you can in the text and then hope for the best. Search engine marketing works best when you have one topic, like a sports blog, or even just a Dallas Cowboys Blog or a Toledo Mudhens Blog. The idea is to get that handful of people floating around that are diehard fans of the thing that you are a diehard fan of. If you ara trend blogger, then you can have troubles with finding the right mix of current interests to current ads. So keep adding content that you have a passion for, with content that you hope people will make a special trip just to see. Remember that most internet users are not big readers. I have a hard time keeping it short myself.
It’s also a good SEO tactic to have a good tracker, like Extreme Tracker, which lists all kinds of odd and wonderful things, like page views and recent searches and geotracking. There is also a little section that tells you about the monitor resolution and color depth of the system looking at your site. This matters for search engine optimization because you need to know where the fold is on your page. Above the fold is where your ads need to be and on lower res monitors, the fold is a lot higher up the page. This is why you see so many ads at the very top of sites.
But really, the most fun you get to have with the trackers is seeing what terms people have used to get to your site. Here are a few of my favorite oddball search terms:
3d anne boleyn images if she lived today
cereal anorexics
do white people like micheal vick
richard avedon queen dog
chief justice roberts how to write to
Ok, people find my site through pretty boring keywords for the most part, that’s what I get for being trendy.
Micheal Vick is my number one search term, followed by the various permutations of JJ Abrams-slusho-montrous-1-18-08-and so on and so forth. My two recent biggest hits were:
digg.com/television/mary_louise_parker_weeds_and_a_big_snake 381 hits
www.netscape.com/viewstory/2007/08/16/britney-heidi-flickr-pick-your-topless-pic-of-the-day-pics/ 94 hits
I guess a little nudity can be a good thing.
Check out my Squidoo Lens on Trend Blogging.
