Getting Your Blog Ranked Highly in Google Part Two – Updated

This is part two of the article originally published by Site Pro News in late December 2004, originally titled “If RSS is the Yahoo backdoor, is a Blog Google’s?”. It has been updated and two additional parts will follow.

You’ll find a few more specific points in this version of the article, as well as updates on some resources the original article covered. Thanks to Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion for linking to part one of article as it appeared in American Chronicles.

To pick up from where we left off in the last article, since we’ve already learned the criteria needed in order to rank highly in Google, Yahoo and other search engines, we then need to do the following things, in this order:

• set up your blog so its content fills a deficit
• figure out best way to make sure your blog does this better than other sites
• find places to leave your link so that it will get spidered quickly
• make sure Googlebot can “see” the link to your blog, and the links from your
blog to the rest of your site.

Creating Content that Has the Best Chance of Being Favored by Search Engines

So what is a content deficit in a search engine, and how do you find one? Why are targeting several content deficits more effective than attempting to target one general focus of content that may appear as if it would send more visitors?

A content deficit, in the simplest of terms, is an area of a search engine that has less competition for terms, but is searched for enough that time spent investing in ranking for a group of these key phrases would be well spent.

It’s easiest to accomplish the task of finding these deficits by using a combination of your web logs or statistics, and a few keyword tools that are covered in the PDF file referenced at the end of this article.

What you’ll find over time, once you begin to rank for these less competitive terms, is that if you choose the right group of them, you may also have the chance to rank for the harder term you were targeting for in the first place.

In conversations with clients, I refer to this method as “climbing from the bottom of the tree.”

The idea is that getting to the top of the search engines, is a bit like climbing a tree. It would seem ridiculous to think that you would walk up to a tree and just jump, and expect to find yourself among the branches at the top.

Yet many of us enter into the effort to get listed by search engines the same way. We expect to be in the top results very quickly if our sites are relevant.

It just doesn’t work that way. In fact, sitting under the search engine tree in the shade just might do your wallet a little better.

According to an article in Information Week, you may want to target searchers for more general terms as affiliates or subscribers rather than as buyers. The study covered in the article states that the buying population tends to reside in the three to four keyword phrase search area.

“Internet users who employ four-word keywords in search engines are more likely to purchase goods or services or receive items of value–such as white papers–than those using one, two, or three words, according to a new report.

For Web-site operators, that means they should create three- and four-word phrases as metadata and keywords to attract visitors.”

(Emphasis mine.)When you think about it logically, it makes sense to structure your blog to take advantage of the keywords for which you’re most likely to rank.

First, ranking well for 10 terms that may only bring 100 visitors a day might be better than showing up in results for one term that brings 1000 visitors a day when the more targeted terms are more likely to be buyers.

If 10% of visitors of the less competitors are more likely to buy, versus 5% of the term that is harder to get listed for, targeting for the more narrow keywords could bring you twice as many favorable prospects.

Second, it’s low hanging fruit. Why expend more energy to get fewer buyers?

So now you know that shooting for the less competitive terms is not only easier, but it may actually be more profitable. So how do you get your blog into one of these deficit areas – and do it better than your competition?

I’ve run out of space for that here, but we’ll go over that in the next part, which you can read a blog I contribute to about Successful Business Blogging.

You can also download more information about keyword research in the free excerpt Lucrative Keywords for Lucrative Traffic [pdf].

Tags: blogging :: business blogging :: successful business blogging :: Google

Resources : Read Part Two in Successful Business Blogging :: Download Lucrative Keywords for Lucrative Traffic [pdf].