How to Begin Targeting Keywords for Products

For many bloggers, their main earnings is through partnerships and sponsorships with other companies, which in some cases, means that you have placed affiliate links on your site. You can’t just have the content through links. You have to realize that people won’t flock to your site unless you appear within search results when they search for the particular keywords, terms, or categories that make up the content.

I’ll be guiding you through an ideal case in which you insert the keywords in a fashion that doesn’t make the reader suggest that you are writing “for the search engines” as some call it, and continues to deliver a continuous stream of traffic once you have published the post and it has gone into your Archives. 

Your Goals: You want the post to be timeless, in that it continues drawing in residual traffic month-after-month, and still interests readers – in that it provides value. In addition, if you have created the post for a sponsor (or to earn money), you want to be sure that your readers/visitors know that you are trying to sell them the product, or you won’t generate any sales and it’ll look more like an ad.

Step 1: When you create the post title, brainstorm some ideas. Much like formatting a traditional blog post, be sure that you are crafting one that attracts readers from search engines and stands out. In other words, when you see that list of ten (less than ten by the time you factor in the number of people who never scroll down), you have to be enticed to click through to your article, and not those of any other site, even if they are much more established than yours.

For example, which of the following would you be more willing to click on from within a search results page? The Product A/B can be substituted for nearly any product or examples, as these simply serve as different examples of how to use the techniques. The average searcher would likely click on something that a) tries to address their problem, b) doesn’t have anything misleading about it (from the title to the excerpted text and link), and c) is fairly creative in trying to persuade them to click the link to the site.

— Review of Product A

— Don’t Be Fooled by Product B’s Misleading Claims

— Improve Your Life with Product A

— What Everyone Should Know About Product A

Step 2: The content will be written during this step. During this step, you want to be sure that you are including the keywords that you are targeting. Include phrases that people may be searching for in the content as it will be included more often in the search engine results, highlighted in bold when a user searches. As the search engine picks up more of the repeated keywords, your page(s) will be served higher, although if you place too many in, it could also have adverse effects, leading to undesired results.

While search engines may utilize title and headline tags, they aren’t as important as just having the text there. Some people neglect to include certain keywords, meaning that they’ll lose out on visitors that may subscribe, continue reading your blog daily, or purchase a product/advertisement on your blog. It is only natural to include headlines, by utilizing the H2 and H3 tags in the blog portion of your content – H1 is generally reserved for the main blog or post title.

Organize your content well. Don’t let paragraphs “bleed” together – keep everything as separated as possible, and include images and links within the content. Remember that the more references you can place to the product or main purpose of the post, the better. Although this post may be referencing many aspects of SEO (it is), you need to use common sense in evaluating where to use ALT (image) and TITLE (link) tags. These will also help readers if they hover over the links/images and for readers that need more accessibility.

Step 3: Utilize a plugin for best results. Plugins such as the Platinum SEO Pack (backwards compatible with the All-in-One SEO Pack) can help you maximize on the number of keywords you place on your blog. They are also ideal for formatting how visitors see your post titles. Rather than Blog Tipz » Post Title, You are able to format it as Post Title | Blog Tipz (or any other format). Additionally, you can use this plugin to focus on your desired keywords through the Keywords and Description area. While the plugin is simple to use, it adds an extra minute or two to each post – you have to manually add them through the bottom of each post.

A few miscellaneous tips on this topic:

• Target keywords that people are searching for (but still relate somewhat to your post).
• Add some misspellings of the word or phrase involved.
• Rearrange the phrases as people would type them in results.
• Use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, designed to help advertisers target searches. For example, by typing in blog, some of the top results for the term (as a rough example) include: blogspot, blogs, blogspot com, blogger, blog com, blogging, blog free, www blog, weblog, blog search… It also provides a rough estimate in the “competition” between each keyword in relation to all keywords.

During this stage, you could also add categories and tags to the post, which add some value to the post. It isn’t a good idea to focus on them, as search engines don’t normally use them as highly (you are supposed to “nofollow” them, anyway).

Step 4: Promote the post. The more links that reference this page/post, the better. Ideally, search engines will continue increasing the page’s “importance” as more sites link back to it. This indicates that the page provides value to readers. Now, some controversy has grown as pages promoting products have dominated search engine results, leading to more “spammy” results. You simply have to promote it in a manner that is ethical but still provides rewards on your end.

Conclusion

While there are additional ways to increase traffic for certain keywords, I have scraped the surface in helping you to promote specific posts. Now, you could skip most of this and simply “pay” for traffic through pay per click, but you would still need to know the basics of what people are searching for, and how they are choosing which sites, if any, to travel to once the results are served.