I have told you all about keywords, and search engine optimization before, and I hope you have gained some knowledge, and hopefully put some of it to use. I would love to hear which sites you people work on, leave me a comment!

Keywords are often hard to come across, and if you have chosen an area in the market, which is already popular, then it’s even harder to optimize those keywords. Just imagine trying to optimize words/phrases like “make money”, “jobs online”, and so forth. I’m sure you can agree with me when I say that it is near impossible. Unfortunately, for those people who are new to the ‘game’ of advertising and making money online, there isn’t much room for making a success in an already established area, unless your ideas are unique or you have a clever way to get traffic to your website.

So what can be done about this? Well, I can’t tell you exactly how to get loads of traffic to your site, and I can’t tell you exactly how to get your website ranked up in the number one spot for the words of your choice, but what I can do is teach you a great little tip for choosing keywords.

As you know, everyone who has a website has a hosting company, which stores your website online. This company should provide you with some kind of control planel, the most popular being cPanel. cPanel is a tool, which allows you to login to your control panel, and within your control panel, there is a statistics section. If you are interested in making money with your blog/website, then you should know what I am talking about, if not, then I suggest you get hold of your hosting company, and find out how to go about checking your statistics and things immediately!

Within your statistics are of your control panel, there are two very useful sections: “Robots/Spiders visitors” and “Search Keyphrases”. These two sections will tell you which search engines people are using to arrive at your website, and further more, which keyword/phrases people are using to arrive at your website. Now, the aim here is to run your blog/site for a month or two, and carefully study these two sections. Let me explain why below..

Robots/Spiders visitors

This section will allow you to see which search engines are crawling your website. This basically means that your site has been listed with these search engines. For example, this website has been crawled many times by Googlebot, MSNbot and AskJeeves - so from this information I can tell that my site has been listed with these search engines. If your site does not have a Googlebot crawling it, then you should go ahead and take the steps to list yourself with Google!

Search Phrases

This is the most important part of this post. Search Phrases are the phrases and words, which people are using in search engines, that land them up at your website. I will return to my fishing example to explain what I am talking about - If you are looking through your search phrases and see, let’s say, three phrases: “fishing rods”, “surfing”, “tackle”. As the author of the fishing website, I will be happy to see “fishing rods” and “tackle” within those results, as those are popular words within my websites topics. The “surfing” phrase is not very relative, so I can ignore it. Now, the thing to do here is start using the phrases “fishing rods”, and “tackle” more often on my website. It is clear that these words are popular words for people to search and arrive at my website, so I will aim to optimize them. Use these phrases in your titles, and bold them in content of the website, and you will slowly start to “own” the words. The more times you use these phrases (within boundaries obviously), the more chances you have for your website to land in the top search results, when a person searches for them!

This is a process, not something you can just do once, and then stop, unless it just takes off the ground immediately, which is great, but rare. View your search phrases often, they change all the time, and choosing the correct words to optimize is crucial for a blog/site which relies on traffic from search engines.

Lastly, after a good couple months of carefully studying your search phrases, and you have selected a couple which work really well for you, include these words in back links. By this, I mean, when someone offers to link to your website, link it to your website using the key phrases you have studied. I have already talked about this: securing your keywords, if you are not following.

I hope that gives you some more information on getting that site of yours up the ranks!