Thursday, September 27, 2007

How to Find Good Blog Post Ideas from your OWN Website

Stumped for a blog post idea? Chances are, you're like Dorothy with her ruby red shoes - you have the answers the whole time. Instead of clicking your heels three times, just log into your your site stat program and check your Keywords.

What are site stats? They are the statistics of who is coming to your blog, how they got there, which websites sent them, which keywords or keyword phrases they used in a Google or Yahoo or any kind of search. Most hosting companies provide these for free, but there are better ones out there, also for free. Look into Google Analytics and StatCounter. Both stat programs are free and invisible.

The Keywords people are using to find your blog are actual words typed into search engines by people interested in what you have to say. You may be scoring on the term "best ceramic flat iron" or "moms who make a million dollars" (I just made these up), but what are your smaller searches for? When you look into your keywords for which terms you're getting, look for the terms that are bringing in 1 search, or 7 searches, or 20 searches.

Small potatoes, right? Yeah, well, it also shows that your blog is coming up deep in the search engine rankings for this term, but you need to do a better job of optimizing for it to bring in an easy 50, 400 or 900 new searches. And chances are, you didn't meant to optimize for it at all. A combination of words from different posts, or you side panel, made your post rank for this particular term. Now all you have to do is write a well optimized post for it.

Gold SEO Nugget Example:
One rainy day, I was sifting through keywords, curious as to how people were finding FashionMista.com. A keyword phrase caught my eye: "do I have to be a good drawer to be a fashion designer."

Excuse me? No, of course you don't. But you had to ask a search engine that question? Fine, I thought. I'll give you the answer. I titled my post that exact question because the Title is the Page Title for that web page, and the Page Title is a very hot ticket for optimizing for SEO. Next, I made sure to weave those phrases throughout my copy in a way that made sense, and I included a picture, filled in the alt tag for that picture, and linked the picture. All very important steps for SEO. Search engines do look for images, and if the image has an alt tag, and is linked, the engine considers those terms especially important, which give you more exposure via higher rankings.

The result? FashionMista is at the top of searches for related queries (yes, people continue to ask the question), and the image I posted is on page 1 in Google Images for "fashion drawing".

So, it pays to sift through your keywords for a quick and easy blog post idea. Happy hunting!

ps: if you do want to learn how to draw for fashion, get the fashion drawing book, 9 Heads, which is fabulous. There are lots of poses, pleats, and ruffles to chose from as you practice.

1 comment:

CindyS said...

Great idea although I wonder sometimes what people are thinking when they search for some of the keywords. :)