Whilst trawling through my web stats at the weekend I noticed that I have a large amount of traffic coming to my site from keyword phrases of the “how to” variety. I have already written on a handful of these topics (which is how I’m getting the traffic in the first place) but many of them are phrases that ask a specific question on a topic I have only covered loosely so there is a lot of potential here.

These are real searches and they are already generating traffic so any one of them could be written out into a SEO’d proper blog post to drive even more traffic. If I had the time and the inclination then I’d do it myself but I have neither so here they are, enjoy! I expect to see you guys outranking me for these terms soon!

1. how can i make a living on line
2. how can i make a pretty table to import into wordpress?
3. how can i make a video blog using wordpress
4. how can social bookmarking help my website?
5. how can you make your tumblr show up on your twitter?
6. how can you possibly leave a comment to all your friends on myspace
7. how can you use the knowledge to sell the product
8. how do comments on other blogs help you
9. how do i build a money making web page from scratch
10. how do i embed a youtube clip in my website
11. how do i insert a chart into wordpress
12. how do i insert an excel file into a wordpress blog?
13. how do i install my favicon?
14. how do i know if blog is do follow?
15. how do i leave a comment on twitter
16. how do i post in other blogs
17. how do i send out a marketing e-mail campaign
18. how do i stop my tweets from updateing facebook
19. how do niche websites make money
20. how do social websites work
21. how do we build effective networking techniques with people far away
22. how do you get adsense to parse your page again?
23. how good are my blog stats?
24. how good is wordpress.org for money making blogs
25. how hard do you work
26. how i can change my face on my webcam image on real time?
27. how many blogs do you have
28. how many ebooks are sold on clickbank
29. how many internet marketing blogs are there
30. how many keywords in domain
31. how many niche sites should i promote
32. how many pages should my clickbank book be
33. how many people use stumbleupon
34. how many reports can i generate on my silver membership at butterfly reports
35. how many subscribers do you need to make a living
36. how many visitors should a niche site get
37. how much do you have to make a month to be rich
38. how much do you need to make a living online
39. how much harder is it to rank for a keyword if it is not in your domain name
40. how much have people earned using adsense
41. how much money can you make off writing ebooks
42. how much money do i need to be rich
43. how much money does a blog generate
44. how much to spend a day for ppc on your ebook
45. how to add value through blog comments
46. how to add youtube clips without sounds
47. how to be the first to leave a comment on a blog
48. how to bookmark using stumbleupon
49. how to boost ctr on adsense
50. how to bring traffic to my blog
51. how to build a cash flow system
52. how to build a site in wordpress
53. how to build a twitter mashup
54. how to build a twitter timeline application
55. how to build a wordpress web site
56. how to build assets and wealth
57. how to build money making sites
58. how to build niche knowledge in my job
59. how to come up with a good keyword?
60. how to come up with a product that really sells
61. how to configure word press to build your news web site
62. how to connect with people on social networks
63. how to connect with people online
64. how to crack stumbleupon and drive traffic
65. how to create a download in a blog
66. how to create a niche blog
67. how to create afilliate site using wordpress
68. how to determine whether niche willl be profitable
69. how to direct traffic to your website using web 2.0
70. how to display excel tables in wordpress
71. how to do seo with social bookmarking sites
72. how to download a backlink url of a particular website using php
73. how to earn money by mail order
74. how to earn money from wordpress
75. how to earn money in wordpress
76. how to embed camtasia into wordpress
77. how to embed rss feed into wordpress
78. how to embed smaller you tube videos?
79. how to embed youtube and make it look good
80. how to embed youtube in windows live writer
81. how to find a product niche
82. how to find good keywords for your niche
83. how to find good long tail keywords
84. how to find high bid keywords
85. how to find high cpc keywords
86. how to find high paying keywords
87. how to find high paying niches
88. how to find influential bloggers in your niche
89. how to find low competition high paying keywords
90. how to find niches for adsense
91. how to find people on stumbleupon
92. how to find rss feeds to auto update my blog
93. how to find site with the do follow tag
94. how to find stumblers similar to you
95. how to gain more followers on twitter
96. how to get a twitter audience
97. how to get more followers on twitter
98. how to get people to sign up for twitter
99. how to get twitter messages when clicking on images
100. how to insert a html table into wordpress
101. how to insert a table into blogger

Internet Marketing Blog Ideas

Popularity: 57% [?]

When starting a niche site, the first step is usually keyword research and then a large majority of the time is spent on content creation and the process seems simple enough - pick profitable keywords to target then write content that targets those keywords but hold on just a moment… there’s more to think about.

Where Are Keywords Used?

Most people don’t really stop to think about where they will use their keywords. They simply identify keywords that they want to rank for and then pimp out their site SEO-wise to try and target that keyword as effectively as possible. But stopping to think about where you use your keywords will reveal the kinds of content you need to create, and where you don’t need content at all.

Your Website Content

This is the most obvious place where you will use your keywords - on your site itself. You’ll create a blog post, article page or something similar that is targeted towards your chosen keyword. You’ll do as much on-page SEO as you can to make your posts & pages rank as well as possible for your chosen keywords. In order for your website to rank for a particular keyword, you need to create content that targets it.

Actually, that last statement is not quite true. Go to Google and type in “twitter tactics”. Depending on where in the world you are, the site http://www.twittertactics.com/ ranks very highly for this keyword and yet it is a completely empty WordPress default blog that was created and then abandoned. The only place where the keyword has been used is in the URL and the title of the site. There isn’t even a post that targets it. However, this keyword is probably not a competitive one so this doesn’t often happen!

Article (Marketing) Content

The next new posts in this project will discuss the backlink strategies that I am using for my niche sites and article marketing is one of them. Now there are two ways in which you can benefit from an article:

* The backlink you place in the article or resource box
* Traffic that comes from the article itself

To utilise the first strategy, you just need to write pretty much any old article that is related to your site and then insert a link back to your site in the resource box. There is nothing to say that you have to target any particular keywords in the article itself because the important part is the backlink for which you will use appropriate anchor text (see below).

However this is only one way to benefit from articles and is really a bit of a wasted potential if that is all you do. Josh Spaulding in his Article Marketing Domination book advocates writing an article that is going to draw in traffic to the article itself and a portion of those people will click through to your link so this way not only do you benefit from the backlink, but from the traffic itself.

There are two ways in which you can approach the process of writing a highly-trafficked article. One way is to once again abandon all keywords and simply write the most compelling article headline you can think of and hope that its listing in the directory will be enough. However if you are in a competitive niche it can be tricky to really stand out from the crowd amongst hundreds of other articles. The other strategy is to utilise the ranking power of the directory and target low competition phrases in the article itself.

When doing your competition research I am sure that you will have seen on many occasions an article from EZine Articles ranking in the top 10 in the serps. Google loves EA, probably a lot more than your site and if you wrote that same article for your website, your EA article would probably out-rank your site article. By utilising the power of popular directories you can target keywords that the directory can rank for and then drive traffic that way.

Web 2.0 Hosted Content

Similarly to the above, there are now a whole bunch of web 2.0 sites where you can host content - but much richer content than is usually allowed in article directories. I’m talking about sites like Squidoo, Hubpages and Weebly to name three of them. Once again, you have two strategies open to you - Just put up a page that is related to your niche and throw in your chosen link or try to create a page that is going to rank for keywords and drive traffic through your link.

For these strategies the keywords that you target for these third party sites does not necessarily have to be the same ones you are trying to rank for on your main site.

Anchor Text

Any time you place a link anywhere, the text that is underlined is called the anchor text. Now in many places you can directly control and create your links specifically. For example in your own blog posts, article submissions, hosted pages on web 2.0 sites and so on. If you leave comments on blogs as a backlink method the name that you leave the comment under counts as the anchor text. Note - I don’t like this method and people who use keywords in the name on my blog have to work that much harder to ensure their comment doesn’t get deleted

There are some links where you don’t specifically control the anchor text. For example, a great way to build lots of links every time you create content is to socially bookmark your posts but each bookmarking site will use its only link creation method. Often the anchor text will be the title that you submit so you have some degree of control but not as much as you do on your own content.

Backlinks are more important than on-page SEO and some people say that the anchor text is one of the most important factors in ranking. It’s much better to rank for a keyword than for your own name for instance. Once again, the anchor text that you choose does not have to be used in the url that you are linking to. Obviously if the anchor text is deemed relevant to the content of the url being linked to then it will be worth more in the eyes of Google but you do not have to target just one keyword for example. You can (and should) vary your anchor text.

Tags

Tags, tags, tags! Tags are everywhere. You can tag your blog posts, tag your boomarks, tag your web 2.0 pages, tag your bum, tag your photos… Wait, one of those might not be quite right but you get the idea! Not much is known about the strength of tagging as far as ranking goes but it certainly doesn’t hurt and like with anchor text, no content is needed for a tag - you just type in whatever tag you feel like.

Now depending on where the tag is, broad tags or more specific tags may work better. For example if you are tagging content in StumbleUpon, broad tags work better as they are used to determine what your page is about and broad tags drive more traffic than specific ones because people tend to search for broad topics.

However if you are tagging something like a Squidoo page, those tags help users find similarly tagged pages and using specific keywords is encouraged.

Keyword Content & Generic Content

Recently I discussed the subject of writing for difficult keywords. What do you do if you want to target a keyword such as “mobile phone buy”? Well you can use the punctuation trick that I mentioned in the article but what you can also do is to use that keyword in places where content is not needed - such as anchor text and tags. Tags work specially well here. You can write a generic article about buying mobile phones and tag it with those specific awkward keywords that are difficult to write for.

When I talked about content research I suggested that you should try to write as uniquely as possible on your site so that you can pick up as much long tail traffic as possible. That is true if you are writing content for your own website but what about that external content that you create for article directories and web 2.0 sites? Those sites are great places to put your generic content that doesn’t really target keywords very well.

For example, in one of the niches that I have looked at, there is a lot of information out there, lots of EZine Articles, lots of PLR packs available but most of the content is very generic in terms of keywords. The content itself is good, gives solid advice to the reader but simply doesn’t target any profitable keywords. Is this content useless? For your site maybe but not for external sites. Write those generic articles for directories and web 2.0 sites and then use carefully crafted links with your chosen anchor text and tag the content with the keywords that you want to target.

Keywords With Low Traffic

When deciding upon niches, we’re looking for keywords that have good levels of traffic and low enough competition that we can rank for it. But if you have spent any length of time with a keyword research tool I’m sure you’ll find a whole bunch of keywords that have very low traffic levels. What should you do with these? Well because the traffic potential is so low it probably is not worth going to the effort of writing lots of specific content for those keywords, and you certainly wouldn’t want to build a whole site around them like with the keyword sniping strategy!

However bear in mind that the vast majority of traffic is from single-searched terms, having all of those weird and wonderful long tail terms on your site can help you pick up significant amounts of traffic over time. Use those keywords in places where you don’t have to go to much effort - use them in anchor text, in tags, in category headings etc.

Conclusion

All keywords have a use but just because you want to target a keyword does not necessarily mean that you have to write content for it. Use the power of third party sites like Ezine Articles to help you rank for terms that your site might not be able to rank for. Use tags wherever you can and use them to target all those long tail phrases with low traffic. Carefully control your anchor text where applicable, and when writing content on third party sites in particular, think carefully about the purpose of the article - for a backlink? To get headline traffic? To rank in the serps? All of those?

Popularity: 51% [?]

When initially doing keyword research and competition research we’re looking at the numbers. We want to know how much traffic potential the keyword has, how much competition it has, what the AdSense CPC is if we’re doing AdSense but rarely do people think ahead to the content creation part. Some keywords are naturally more difficult to write for than others so for some of those awkward one, I hope this guide helps.

Keywords That Don’t Make Sense

When people go to a search engine and starting typing in words, often they will start with a broad search and when that brings back too many irrelevant results they narrow it down by adding extra keywords. What this often results in, are keyword phrases that don’t read well - they can’t be used naturally in a sentence. For example, somebody looking to buy a mobile phone might start off by typing mobile phone and then, add the word buy to the end of it, resulting in mobile phone buy. This keyword probably has a ton of traffic but its much more difficult to write for than the more intuitive, buy mobile phone.

When doing my keyword research if I have a long list of keywords then I’ll tend to skip these ones but if the numbers are very tempting or there are not many competitive keywords in that niche, then creatively writing for these tricky keywords might be the only way into a competitive market.

The solution is the creative use of punctuation. In Google, punctuation characters such as periods and commas do not count, so the phrases mobile phone buy and mobile phone. Buy are the same in the eyes of Google. For example, if I was writing a title for this keyword I might try something like:

Everyone Needs a Mobile Phone! Buy the Best You Can

Of course, this is not ideal as the keyword is in the middle and not at the beginning, but it’s better than not being able to target the keyword at all.

Keywords That Are A Single Topic

In my earlier post on content research I was advocating the creation of multiple unique articles rather than writing a single article and then re-writing it multiple times. My reasoning for this is that when you write completely unique articles you use different words which means that you get the chance to grab more long tail traffic. If you take one article and re-write it a bunch of times, the actual words used within the article are likely to be highly similar so the keyword net that you can cast won’t be quite as broad.

So, what do you do in those odd cases where the keyword itself simply doesn’t lend itself to multiple topics; when it is a topic in itself? For example, a phrase I’ve seen used before is “how to build a deck”. Now I don’t know much about deck building but I’m assuming that there is pretty much only one way to build a deck so it would probably be difficult to write a dozen different articles on it.

What I would do in this situation, is create a very large article and break it into as many parts as were needed, and title each one similarly, eg “How to Build a Deck, Part #1″ and so on.

Keywords With Little Content

In my previous article  I showed you several ideas of where to look for content so hopefully you have plenty of topics to write about in order to target your keyword. The ideal situation would be that you can write something unique for each article so that you can grab extra long tail traffic for each one but if you’re really struggling to come up with enough unique ideas then you may have to resort to rehashing similar content in creative ways.

1. What is [keyword]
2. Why is [keyword ] important
3. Where to find [keyword] on the Internet
4. Looking for [keyword]
5. The best to find [keyword]
6. Top 5 things to remember when looking for [keyword]
7. Top 3 [keyword] tips
8. [keyword]
9. Information about [keyword]
10. What is [keyword] so useful

Obviously they won’t all be appropriate for every keyword. You can’t write a “what is” article if your keyword begins with a question for example but hopefully this list will give you a little starting point.

Other Ideas?

I’ve only put three examples here and offered my own solutions to them, but I’d be delighted to hear your ideas on this topic. Have you had trouble writing for certain types of keywords? If so, what did you do about it? Do you have any alternatives for the suggestions I have made here?

keyword writing

Popularity: 39% [?]