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In taking the 31 days to a better blogger, my assignment yesterday was to write a post that would help my readers and today’s is to target a new reader. Perhaps I can consolidate that into one post — I’m all for conserving energy

I have a couple of new readers — Ralph for one and Sandy for another.

How Eyespi20 Got a New Reader

Sandy came to me through Entrecard looking for a graphic she could use as an avatar (that badge she invites you to grab is the graphic I created for her). She writes a travel blog that introduces us to some really gorgeous places in her home state of California. Her blog is hosted by Google on the blogspot platform which is free and she’s using a very plain template for it. She has a PR of 1 and an Alexa of 200K which are both pretty good numbers! I think her PR could be improved though as she’s very niche with what and where she’s targetting with this blog.

How This Article Can Help Her

One of the things I notice immediately are the labels she puts with each post. Having labels on the posts certainly helps Google index them, but there are some tricks she could employ to assist in that indexing.

For one thing, she has too many labels and most of them are one or two words that leave the label very generic. The rule of thumb is to keep keywords limited to 10 or less. More than that and you overload the indexing bot I guess or maybe it’s just programmed to ignore after that.

For example, her last post is about Alcatraz Island and her labels are “Alcatraz, Bird Santuary, California, Capone, Civil War, Escape, Famous, Fog, Indians, Machine Gun Kelly, Prisoners, San Francisco, The Rock”. If you do a search on any of these in Google, you will not come up with Sandy’s blog at all — certainly not on the first page, even with Sanctuary misspelled!

Google Keyword Tool and How To Use It

Entering the words “Alcatraz Bird Sanctuary” in Google’s keyword tool gives us some better ideas of words to use as our labels.  You want to look for a combination of search volume combined with as low “advertiser competition” as possible.

That leaves us with a couple of fairly good terms to use as keywords for  Sandy’s article and are in fact some she’s used in the article, just not used as labels.

A couple that have a search volume of 2,900 but not as much competition on are “Alcatraz night tour” and “Alcatraz ferry”. These would be great labels for Sandy to use and would probably get her article indexed. The term “blue alcatraz” also has some potential as it had 1,600 searches for that keyword combination but shows very little competition among advertisers for it.

She has to not only use these as labels, but also needs to have those exact phrases in her article as well. The first two would be very easy as they are either already there or are there in another form or could be put in the article without changing a thing about it. the “blue alcatraz” might be tougher, but I’ll bet Sandy is a talented enough writer that she could find something to write about that would use those words in that order in her article.

Using Keywords Isn’t Rocket Science

It doesn’t take total re-writes of articles to make the best use of keyword phrases, nor does incorporating them into your article have to interfere with your writing style. Doing a tiny bit of research on what terms you’ve already used in your article (such as starting with ones Sandy had already chosen) then tweaking them around a bit both in the tags or labels you use on your article can gain you much in terms of notice by other sites as well as by those indexing spiders!

How do you think you can use the keyword tool to your best advantage? Do you already use it?

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