Keywords: Choosing and Placing

From Grizzly's "Make Money Online For Beginners" website/blog Part 2 of Common mistakes bloggers who want to earn lots of money onlline make and how to fix them.

Excerpts from Part 2:

Let me use my blog as an example of how I target keywords using my blog title.

Now when I started this blog I chose to use "Make Money for Beginners" as my blog title and managed to get these terms for my URL as well. I didn't bother targeting "Make Money Online" at first as this would have been over reaching. When you start out pick keywords that can be attained in a short period of time. By attained I mean ranking on page 1 of the SERP's. I took over top spot for "Make Money for Beginners" in just over a month. This was relatively easy as there are only 2.5 million competing sites for this term. Are there a lot of searches for this term... not really, maybe 10 - 20 per week but it was a good starting point.

The term allowed me to add more keywords as I gained PR and something I call Google Bot Attraction. When I noticed I was getting crawled frequently, I changed my Blog title to "Make Money Online for Beginners". Within a few days I found that I went from page 3 for the term all the way to top spot on page 1 on Google. I also held onto top spot for the previous term "Make Money for Beginners". Pretty cool I thought. I recently added the words "How to" to my title and sure enough I got top spot the following day for "How to Make Money Online for Beginners" as well. Now I can't say that I get a ton of traffic for these exact terms as most people don't add "for Beginners" to the query. However by adding the "Online" and "How to" terms I noticed that my blog moved up drastically in the SERP's for the terms "How to Make Money Online" and "Make Money Online" which are both found in my Title.

The point of all this is to plan things out when starting your blog. Pick your primary keyword and then use "long tail" keywords that compliment your primary keyword as a starting point. As more and more of your long tails' get indexed and achieve high ranking they boost your primary keyword ranking in the process and more importantly bring in traffic for secondary keywords related to your niche.

The best way to bolster your Blog title and your primary keyword is the often overlooked "blog description" area. With websites this is contained in the Meta Tags and it is now ignored by Google and a few other search engines thanks to keyword stuffing abusers. It is not ignored on blogspot blogs however and is a powerful aid for getting your secondary keywords ranked.

I change mine all the time when I want Google to rank me higher for recent popular searches. My Blog Title tells Google that in general this blog is about how to make money online. My description tells Google the specifics of how this is done. When I find popular subjects like "Project Payday" or "Yahoo Answers" I quickly do a little research, write a few posts and then change my description to let Google know that I cover these popular subjects and more importantly I let searchers know it too as my description is displayed in the SERP's. This works like a charm and gets me ranked well for just about any topic I choose. A word of caution though. Each time you make a change there is a delay of a few days to a week where you will see a drop in traffic as Google drops your rankings for previous terms that you have removed from your description. It usually takes a good week before your new terms are indexed and start drawing traffic.