This is a great and helpful post from Ray from the theblog-log.net, I’ll let Ray get on with it;

Are you using keywords effectively tp promote your site?  As bloggers most of us do the same things to promote our sites.  We comment at other sites (the bigger the better), we tweet our posts, and occasionally we will find someone to publish a guest post for us.  The guest posting is always very exciting isn’t it?  You generally wait a few days for your post to be published, and then you sit back and wait for the torrent of new readers.  What’s that?  You say, “Yeah, I got a few more for a day or two, but I didn’t start challenging Problogger for a top spot, or anything like that.”  Well that isn’t really a problem.  You want to know why?  It’s because although you may not have realized it at the time, you weren’t guest posting for the referred visitors.  Nope!  You were doing it for the backlink.

The reason you may not have known the real reason to guest post is because it really isn’t talked about enough in blogging circles.  Most bloggers have dreams about making money with their blogs.  Not all, but most harbor at least a little hope of someday making some money through their blogging.  As bloggers we see articles all the time about driving traffic to our blogs.  It’s all about the traffic we are taught.  More readers = more income.  Right?  Well, not necessarily.  For income it is not enough just to have a lot of people come traipsing through your blog getting their muddy footprints all over the carpet.  Nooooo.  We don’t need tourists.  We need targeted traffic.  We want readers that have found our blogs by conducting searches using keywords that relate their interests to the niche our blogs occupy.  And that’s the key.  Isn’t it convenient that the key to internet income is keywords?  It’s like a little reminder of what we need to focus on.  Working toward a ranking in the search engines through building backlinks using anchor keywords is what we need to learn to do.  And we need to rank on the first page of the search engine results.  Preferably in the top 4 or 5.

So how do we use keywords?  By placing them strategically throughout our articles.  They will be used in the title of our posts.  We will want to use them in the content of the article near the beginning. (I freely switch between the terms “article” and “post”, but I mean the same thing with both)  and we will place them in the tags associated with the article.  Having only used the wordpress platform I can’t speak to the other blogging platforms, but with wordpress there’s a handy little app on the right side of the text editor that is used exclusively for adding tagwords to the article. and we will place them in the tags associated with the article.  Having only used the wordpress platform I can’t speak to the other blogging platforms, but with wordpress there’s a handy little app on the right side of the text editor that is used exclusively for adding tagwords to the article.

In order to move further up the ranks, we will want to add more articles to our sites by using variations on our keywords.  If our site was concerned with widgets…not the blogging kind, the classic business school kind…the imaginary product, we might want to write articles about “how to breed widgets” and “breeding widgets”, or ‘how to recognize widgets.”  You might want to write an article on “the 10 best widgets of 2009″.   Are you getting the idea now?  The more keywords and keyword phrases we can create or get content for the better.

Lentil Soup
Creative Commons License photo credit: Emiline220

Then, of course there’s the issue of getting backlinks from other sites.  But that’s another article.

As always, comments are encouraged.

Again if you liked what you have read go and check Ray out at theblog-log.net

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Filed under: Blogging • Guest Post • Starting Out • Useful

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