English:Image via WikipediaEvery time you start a website, you hope to get traffic. You hope that your brand will be elevated to “YouTube” status, and your visitors will keep coming back over, and over and over again. But the simple truth is - that doesn’t happen.

On the rare occasion that you launch a site that attains godly traffic, a major contributor is bound to be social networks. But social network traffic is a bit finicky. It (they) don’t stay around too much. Quite a few of my friends have made the front page of Digg, their numbers jumped up for a couple days, and then the new visitors were all gone. So aside from a better Alexa ranking, what did they have to show for it? Nothing except a crashed server…

So how do you make sure that you will get traffic day in and day out - no matter what time of year it is or what holiday is coming up? Through search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization Promotes Long Term Traffic

Search engine optimization is the failsafe way of getting free, residual, long term traffic. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to optimize a site. It just takes some work and a bit of coding. But hey, we’re bloggers. We love to tweak and hack and tweak some more. Why not focus our energy on getting ranked in the search engines?

I am not going to bore you with the explanations of what SEO does, or why it is important. That’s what I do everyday with Tech Solution. Oftentimes, I have to educate a client on its importance before I sell them the service. But you all know what it is and why its beneficial - so we are going to move on to the SEO tip!

Finding Sensational Keywords

Websites live and die by keywords. Keywords are THE most important part of a website. I don’t care how many inbound and outbound links there are - if your keywords suck, so will your rankings.

There are a lot of different ways to go about finding good keywords. I particularly like these tools:

  • GoodKeywords - A downloadable application that does everything from keyword suggestions to phrase building. It’s also free!
  • SEO Book Keyword suggestions - enter your keyword and see how many results come up. It cross references Google, Yahoo, PPC bid prices and Wordtracker!
  • Digital Point’s Keyword Suggestion Tool - A nice tool that gives you readouts of Wordtracker and the Overture database.
  • Wordtracker - A very, very good paid application for finding keywords. If you are moderately serious about building good sites - buy it.

Your best bet is to cross reference the sites and come up with a list of 40-60 strong keywords. These keywords should be spread out through the site pretty equally, with your top 5 used on most of the pages.

Choosing Keywords

Most search marketers would leave it at that. They would give you the tools without ever really getting at what is a good keyword! Not here, though.

Let’s take the word ‘marketing’ for instance. If I type marketing into the SEO Book Keyword Tool, I will get umpteen results. A lot of people will think, “That’s a great keyword - Look at all the hits per month!” Well, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Marketing keyword list

As we proceed down the list, we start seeing, “Marketing plans, affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing news, and so on.” Those are getting better.

My point is, the more you drill your topic down, the EASIER it will be to rank well for it in the search engines. Don’t be misled by the big ‘daily estimated search results.’ There are 16 million sites that are ranked for that keyword. Instead, focus on the keyword that isn’t competitive. Realistically, look at the ones that are two, three, and even four words long. After all, the average Google query is four words! Use that to your advantage.

Fantastic Keywords generate long term, sustainable traffic

At the end of the day, your site will thrive through the search engines. It doesn’t matter if you have a business blog, a tech magazine, or a corporate presence. Search engines aren’t going anywhere. No matter who’s merging with who, or who does what - we all still need a way to search for things on the Internet.

What are your thoughts on keywords? Have you had good luck with some you never planned for? I know I get 20% of my traffic on JDsBlog from the keyword ‘Time Management.’ Have you ever had the same situation?

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