Make the Million

Optimizing Your Keywords Part 1

Search Engine Optimization is an interesting subject and an important topic to know about. With the expected increase of internet sales making up 40% of all sales around the world by 2020, it’s no secret that getting to the top of the most popular search engine is important. As I continue to read everything I can get my hands on, I’ve come across a few free tools to help you optimize your blog.

Keywords and Key Phrases are an important part of being found by Google’s search engine. So the first step to optimizing the keywords you use is to figure out what kind of blog you are. Whether you offer financial advice, baby advice, dog training advice, whatever. Hopefully you can figure this out easily, but if you’re a blog that’s kind of all over the place (ahem, like us) then look at your posts and see what they’re usually about. Personal blogs are harder to pinpoint and you might have to rely more so on networking.

Open Excel and start a new worksheet. Type “Keywords” in A1.

Search your competitors in Google’s top 5 or 10 and copy their URL into this little tool, which will then tell you what keywords they used. Take note of what keywords are used in the multiple sites and record them in an Excel worksheet under “Keywords“.

Say your blog is about dog training. Go to Google, type in dog training and copy the url’s from the first page into Abakus.

Compile a list of keywords used and then head over here and find the different synonyms for the keywords you found. Also use the thesaurus found in Microsoft Word, it works very well. Enter “Ontology” in B1 and record your results.

After you have a healthy list of keywords, put together some key phrases like “puppy training, puppy training guide, puppy training foundation, puppy training basics, how to train a puppy, how to teach a puppy, etc” and head over here.

This site will tell you how often it was searched by people and give you a total, which you should then multiply by 2.5 to get a better estimate on your numbers. Copy the “Ontology” keywords or key phrases into the “Keywords” category one by one and do the search. If you want better, more accurate results you can use this site but it does cost money. There is a free 7 day trial though.

Record the results in in C1 under “Searches.”

Using these 3 tools should give you a better understanding of what keywords and phrases are to help Google find your site.