Simon’s Notes

When I first started this blog, SEO was the last thing on my mind, in fact, I had no idea what SEO was (for those of you that still don’t know, SEO stands for search engine optimization). My focus was purely on writing and collecting links. In the short time that I’ve been blogging, I’ve learned so much and there is already a whole list of things that I would do differently if I started again.

Recently I’ve come to realize that SEO is critical if I want to build any sort of online empire, so I’ve started learning. From my limited knowledge, the way to go about it is to start in the beginning. Pick your niche then look for keywords and key phrases to focus on. All of this should be done before you actually start your blog, but because I had already started my blog, I decided to see if I had gotten lucky and maybe there was a keyword or phrase that I was doing ok for and that I could build on.

There are many sites out there that allow you to track your blogs stats, personally I use statcounter.com, and mybloglog.com. By simply checking where visitors to my blog were coming from, I was able to figure out that the only times they came from a search engine were for the phrases

• ‘bux.to’
• and ‘money note’ or ‘money notes’

There were some other phrases but nothing worth mentioning. On google I rank quite high for ‘bux.to’, if you do a google search you’ll see that I come third. And for the phrase ‘money note’ I’m also third place, I think that’s pretty good. When doing a bit of research, using wordtracker and google trends, I found out that the phrase ‘money note’ gets searched about 500 times per day. Coming in at third place and having my phrase searched 500 times per day should bring me some traffic, but the fact is that I get more traffic from the keyword ‘bux.to’ and it doesn’t get searched nearly as many times as ‘money note’.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I get so few hits from google, and I think I have an idea. I have a key phrase and it looks pretty good, but my problem is that anybody who does a search for ‘money note’ is not looking for a blog about business and finances, my guess is that they are looking for something to do with actual money notes. And since my blog description says that this site is about business and finances they skip it.

So if you’re reading this and thinking about starting a blog make sure that you do your research and cater your blog to the key phrases that you want to optimize for, or optimize key phrases that are relevant to your blog. It’ll be worth the extra effort.

Simon

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Filed under: Blogging by Simon Rodrigues