Wordtracker offers a wide variety of tools and reports to help you narrow the list of which keywords you should focus on in your blog posts to maximize potential traffic.

Other options similar to Wordtracker include the ones at www.Wordze.com and www.KeywordDiscovery.com. Like Wordtracker, each of these sites requires paying a fee, but free trials are available so you can test drive-them before you pay anything out of your pocket.

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Your goal in search engine optimization is to attract incoming links, particularly incoming links from popular, authoritative blogs and Web sites. The best way to attract incoming links is to write excellent blog posts that people want to share. Other bloggers are a likely source for incoming links, but even online news and media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times have been known to link to individual blog posts. Those links are valuable to beginner bloggers!

You can increase your incoming links by making the most of your online relationships in the following ways:

✓ Use social bookmarking, social networking, and microblogging to share links to useful posts.

✓ Write content for multiple Web sites and interlink them.

✓ Write articles for online publications related to your blog’s topic.

✓ E-mail top bloggers or news organizations who might be interested in sharing your posts.

✓ Don’t be afraid to “toot your own horn” when you think you have something interesting to share.

Outgoing links are also important to search engine optimization. Search engines value linked text, and as far as Google is concerned, the links within your blog posts as well as the text around the links within your blog posts are rated as more important than the other text within your blog posts. Use relevant keywords in your links whenever possible to make sure search engines see them and weight them accordingly.

A key component to SEO success is building relationships with other bloggers and Web site authors who are likely to link to, share, and promote your content.

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To create a Google AdWords account, visit Google Adwords Page and click the Start Now button shown below.

If you prefer, you can use a version of the Google AdWords Keywords tool without creating a Google AdWords account: Just click here, as shown below.

Simply enter a keyword and click the Get Keyword Ideas button, and a list of keyword suggestions is displayed with average search volume statistics and search volume statistics for previous months, shown below.

Use the Choose Columns to Display drop-down menu to see as many as seven columns of data, as shown in the figure below. You can also use the Match Type drop-down menu to display broad, phrase, or negative results, and you can scroll to the bottom of the list of related keywords to find links that let you save the results as a text, Microsoft Excel, or CSV file.

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Unless your blog appears within the first 30 or so results for a specific keyword search, therefore, people are unlikely to find your blog by using engines. Not all the news is bad, however. With each new blog post you write, you create a new entry point for your blog. You can optimize each post for search engines in order to exponentially boost your chances of people finding your blog by way of search engines. In other words, each blog post gives you a new opportunity to create content that focuses on keywords your audience uses to find content. Your goal is to write useful content on your blog so that when a person finds it by using a search engine, she’s compelled to click through and visit additional posts. The ultimate goal is to convert that search traffic into loyal readers.

Of course, keyword-targeted posts can drive traffic, but unless those keywords are relevant to your overall blog content, don’t expect visitors who find your blog by searching for those irrelevant keywords to stay for long, and they certainly won’t become loyal readers. When people who want to find the type of content you publish on your blog open their preferred search engines and type their queries, they use certain keywords. Your goal is to write posts that contain those keywords.

It pays to be specific. Using the example mentioned earlier in this chapter, if your blog is about search engine optimization, you need to determine your overall niche or the niches of your individual blog posts. Rising to the top ten in a Google search for the keyword search engine optimization is nearly impossible because so much competition exists, including competition from some of the top Web sites now online that have deep pockets and phenomenal reputations.

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