Using tags as keywords, integrating keywords into your headers, as well as titles, can certainly help you optimize your content to deliver relevant results to people that search for terms with the included words, but isn’t where you should stop. People might not be thinking like you when you wrote your content, so your keywords might not be of much help when they aren’t the same as what people are searching for.

A great way to find keywords is by using your search engine, something that we have all become accustomed to by now.

In this post, I’ll explain a few ways to find good keywords which you can use as tags or include throughout your content (I advise you against writing for the search engines, of course). I’ll be focusing on terms related to this blog, such as “blogging,” “blogging tips,” etc.

Google

As the market leader, Google has recently introduced some tools that make it easier to find related searches and discover what people are searching for.

You’ll find that there is a list of related searches when after you enter in the keywords. In most cases, you’ll find that you have to go to a separate options area to access this feature. Nonetheless, is is provided without having to do much work.

Some of the related searches that it discovered for the term “blogging” were: starting a blog, advantages of blogging, business blogging, blogging history, blogging software, blogging dangers, blogging sites, blogging in education, free blogging, and blogging websites. Terms that weren’t included in your search are highlighted, while the terms you used are highlighted in the results.

These keywords also tend to be the most popular, including their order, so you may want to investigate writing posts around them.

A “Wonder Wheel” feature is also available, which is similar, in helping you dissect how people search. Branching off “blogging” is “podcast,” which breaks down to: “podcast tutorial,” podcast pickle,” “podcast adult,” “podcast education,” “sopcast,” “zencast,” “create a podcast,” and “podcast player.” This time, results became a little less similar, but still related.

Yahoo

Yahoo’s related searches are a part of their “Search Assist” technology, included at the page when you click “More…” next to the “Also try” bar.

The terms were similar to that of Google’s, although they are a bit more diversified, ranging form “blogging sites,” “blogging project runway,” “free blogging,” “make money blogging,” through “political bloggers.”

Nonetheless, the first few actual results were similar to Google’s results, however beyond this, they were quite different. The key in targeting keywords is to use a mixture of what people would actually search for, based on more vague and more long-tail keywords, which might not see as much traffic initially.

Interesting between Google’s and Yahoo’s results is the fact that advertisers are able to target better on Google (at least in my opinion), providing more relevant advertisers for these terms (Yahoo’s focuses on a variety of Internet products, form hosting to search engines, while Google’s includes actual blogging services and tools).

Ask

Still a contender, Ask offers a mixture between the other search engines. The actual definition of the term is delivered, along with phrases, rather than keywords (within the right panel).

Often branching away from the traditional search engine, this one bases some of its results on questions that people “answer,”  in posts. Let’s say you create a post that contains a question in the title. This search engine may index it, linking to the page, although this is fairly new, under “Ask Q&A.”

Some of the relevant related searches for “blogging” include: “What is the Meaning of the Term Blogging?,” “How Do I Start Blogging?,” “Define Blogging,” “History of Blogging,” “Blogging Advice,” “Explain Blogging,” “Blogging Guides,” “Blogging Phenomenon,” “Blogging Tips,” “What Is a Blog?,” “What Is a Blogger?,” and “What Exactly Is a Blog?”

Most of these questions could be answered simply by looking at results, after clicking on one of these related searches. Ask, in all honesty, might be the best search engine for determining what people are looking for when they visit your blog. You are able to pinpoint questions that people may be asking, especially if you don’t personally receive a lot of feedback on your site.

Bing/Live

Bing is a re-branded search/decision engine that combines Microsoft’s older “Live” search engine into a new version.

It’s results are a little different than the other search engines, as you may only be given one result. In the case of the term I used, you are given a sidebar with additional areas to search through, including: “Overview,” “Key Concepts,” “Software,” “Guidelines,” “Community,” and “News.” This helps you separate the results by category, ideal for if you are writing posts and want to specifically target an area without having to include additional criteria in your search keywords.

Beneath these main ares are related searches, which change what is shown above them as you click on and search for additional keywords. In the case of Bing, these terms/searches were displayed: “Blogging Sites,” “Blogging Websites,” “Blogging For Money,” “MSN Blogging,” “Myspace Blogging,” “Blogging Directory,” “Blogging Tips,” and “Blogging 101.”

Conclusion

Over the span of the time that you are blogging, many keywords should become apparent as being more popular. They are often added through naturally written posts, although you should occasionally focus on adding them to your site through tags and in your titles. When you are able to specifically target keywords, you will see better rankings within the search engines, which only leads to more traffic in the long-term.

Through all this, it becomes apparent that the future of search engines is by helping you find information more quickly when you don’t know exactly what you are looking for, with the search engine helping you discover additional topics.

For one, look at the traffic that you can receive just by linking to another site. In most cases, when you have trackback support enabled on your blog (the links generally have to be displayed on the linked-to site), you will receive additional traffic from the visitors to the article you have linked to.

When you take into account that individual posts can contain nearly a dozen links or more, depending on how generous you are about linking out, you can certainly see a decent stream of traffic from these articles. In reality, this traffic won’t exist forever. If the site owner decides to delete the post or the entire blog, you won’t receive the traffic, and trends for the traffic will see declines unless the individual post sees an increase in traffic.

Even though you might think that trackbacks can’t deliver a strong amount of traffic, you have to think about what users are looking for when they visit a post, especially one where the conversation or additional details are continued elsewhere. This is also the reason why no single site has been able to dominate a niche and “steal” the traffic from every other site. People want to read other users’ thoughts on the particular news item or ideas.

Other forms of traffic can be from email messages, although a declining trend when everyone seems to be using Twitter and other tools for staying in contact with others. The “sharing” widgets that are present on many blogs allows visitors to connect with their friends, sharing the posts that they might have enjoyed the most through various forms of medium.

Beyond search engines, there are many ways to get quality traffic. You just have to learn where to look and how to harness it to your advantage.

So, why should I care about the PageRank update, the decrease in PageRank, or any other factors associated with it?

Well, first of all, PageRank is simply a factor in Google’s ranking system that determines how “popular” a website is against others. It is simply a factor that people tend to use to generate an importance of a website against others, especially when going to buy or sell a site. In truth, it has little to do with this, and changes quite often (several times per year), resulting in a site that could go from an importance of six to three, and vice versa, without a huge change in the number of links pointing to that site.

Reasons to Not Care About Your PR

Listed below are a few reasons I don’t really see a reason to change what I have been doing just because my PageRank has either increased or decreased.

1. When you see a drop in PageRank (often seen as a penalty), you aren’t really doing anything wrong. If more sites approach a PageRank of 10 (which takes a long time), an adjustment may be made based on the algorithm to adjust all other sites for this change, somewhat like a distribution. This is just a theory, but may have been the cause for some drops in PR over the past.
2. An increase in PageRank means that your site has gained some links from other sites. Whether it was through a request, a comment (if the blog is “DoFollow”), or posts that you have written have been heavily linked to, due to popularity. Traffic, number of comments, or revenue from the site don’t necessarily grow during this period.
3. Google is simply a company that happens to operate an extremely powerful and popular search engine. A majority, or at least a significant portion, of your traffic, is delivered through their tools. You either have to live with the fact that they have “awarded” your site a lower PageRank or stop blogging and creating websites. There is really no way to get it back when you lost it unless they explicitly tell you what you did wrong, give you a listing of other sites that have performed the same as yours over the period, and all the secrets to their algorithm – all of which won’t happen.
4. Complaining about a decrease in PageRank or saying that you deserve a higher PR won’t instantly increase it. Building websites that conform to what most users are looking for, while still being conservative about how you go about doing it, likely will. You don’t have to be an expert at creating websites/blogs to get the idea about how to lay out and organize a blog.
5. On selling a website: PR should rarely be used when selling a website. Someone will buy your website based on the number of visitors, revenue, growth, subscribers, and sites that link to it. Yes, PageRank might be considered one of the forces involved in this equation, but in general, it cannot be used as the sole basis of selling or buying a website.
6. On selling advertisements: Again, would you rather buy an ad on a website based on a PageRank of 3 or daily visitors of 2,000? Personally, those two thousand advertisers are going to be more appealing to me, even if I were selling permanent text links.

Conclusion

If there was a ranking system that was used to help everyone determine the “value” of their website, I am sure that we would all base our site against that. However, there isn’t and probably will never be. PageRank might be worthy of consideration in a few cases, especially pertaining to how your site ranks in the search engine (although not directly), but perhaps only in that example.

Under no circumstance should you base your blog’s value on a theoretical value that might change the very next day. Over time, base it on how your blog has grown and what someone could expect to see from it should they buy it. Don’t let a company that might never look at your blog how your site is performing, especially “against” all other blogs/websites.

On Tuesday, the three-year old Python Sitemap Generator was updated to an open-source version, which finds new and modified URLs based on your webserver’s traffic, log files, or the files found on the server. It can provide a very successful and fast method at calculating the rate of inclusion into search engines or update rates.

The service/application is intended for users who have full control over their web server environment. It is essentially a plugin that can be installed on both Linux/Apache and Microsoft Windows-based servers. For the most part, the open-source aspect won’t affect the average user, but expands the possibilities for people who look at it from the customizability and feature standpoints – web hosting providers may add it to their back-end to make the decision more clear for people who may be eying their service.

Text: In Blogger, click on Webmaster Tools under the category “Tools and Resources” and enable the feature if you haven’t already. This tells the service to add all your blogs to the service (you may still have to verify them).

While the tools offered by Google are considered some of the easiest, and best integrated among the free software available, I am not directly referring to the services that it offers, rather the idea that your entire blog should run based off any one company that is trying to generate a profit by “selling” its services — convincing people to use its search engine, in this case.

The Premise

Your traffic initially solely is driven by Google search results.  People discover your site through search engines, looking for tips, content, and other forms of media, which they either discard, not finding anything of use, or bookmark, subscribe, or share the site with others, leaving you in a great position.  Your main goal, as a content creator, is to convince people that they need to subscribe, an arbitrary decision that you should make as soon as you start seeing traffic levels that exceed what you initially predicted, levels that will be able to continue growing.

What Google (and any other search engine does, for that matter), is deliver results to Internet users, based on queries that have been entered into the box.  The results are based on the relevance to the terms entered, then the user is able to select the result, influenced by keywords, titles, and URLs of the individual websites.  They do not rule your blog, determining how much money you make, what type of content you produce, or the types of visitors that you receive on your blog — these are all driven by your particular actions and how you present your blog.

Become Independent of all Search Engines

There is no step-by-step guide available to set you free of all search engines, but there are some key tips to help you advance your blog and learn that they are generally working against your blog and your much larger ambitions.

First, you have to rehearse your goals again in your head.  Like I previously mentioned in a previous post, your goals should stick with you, constantly molding and adapting to each step and progression that you make in your blogging adventure.  If you are working towards growing your subscriber, or community base, you’ll need to create several lead-in pages to ensure that you receive a greater click-thru rate and return rate for the time you spend doing these steps.

Each person (whether a direct visitor, referred from another site, or from search engines) you are able to get to subscribe to your blog is one less person that will be forced to search for your content from search engines, and one that is likely to visit or read your content nearly every day.

Secondly, everyone believes that traffic is the key to earning and growing your online business.  This is true, in a sense, as without traffic, your site is simply a compilation of text, images, and other media formats like video.  However, when you combine everything together, a site is a piece of inspiration for others, source of content for another individual, and income generator for you.  

Quality versus quantity is where all differences start.  Traffic from search engines is generally targeted, as someone is looking for that particular piece of information, but the results may not be the most relevant for his or her search.  Thus, the impact would be monumental in the amount of time this person would spend on your site.  When you are able to grow you quality traffic, you are able to exceed your month-over-month goals.

To drive traffic from search engines into people that visit your site directly, you need to focus directly on your brand and image.  The first place to start would be in your blog theme.  This is often the first element of what you have to offer that people see when they venture to your property.  Every site, even if just text, has a theme.  Make yours unique, standing out from the rest.  My theme is not the most unique, but I did customize a few elements of it to convey a strong message to visitors.

Next, use plugins that help readers stay connected with your site, including the social bookmarking buttons/drop-down lists, “forcing” your visitors to bookmark your content for a later time.  

Leverage the 10-75% of your visitors coming from search engines into visitors that respond well to your blog, instinctively knowing that you are the premier source for information – content that will stick with them, even after leaving your blog.  In another sense, you also want to encourage readers to continue returning, break apart content to garner a lower bounce rate, then focus on other areas down the road.

On Page Rank: This is simply a ranking system developed by Google to place more importance on more popular sites, although advertisers (who want links back to their websites) look at it as a more important measurement device.  Should you fear a drop in your rank, there are ways of recovering it, although you likely lost it because you were not fairly doing business on your blog.

Final Thoughts

Since blogging is one of the most difficult professions to get into, you must be aware that it takes a lot of time, months turning into years, until your blog is to the “authority” level that you wanted it to reach.  Once you reach this level, you can literally become independent of other traffic generation services, including Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask, and the other smaller sources.  At this point, you’ll be able to further leverage this control on your blog and draw in return visitors — results that many bloggers strive for day in and day out.

If you try using a Page Rank prediction or verification service that gathers data from multiple data centers, you may find that it won’t work.  This update will primarily be displayed in the Google Toolbar, if you are using it.  

Despite the popularity of using Page Rank as a determining factor of a site’s value (and advertising prices), it should never be used solely to determine a blog’s popularity.  Practice good blogging and you’ll see more benefits than simply an increase in your rank.

Has your Page Rank increased or decreased?  Does Page Rank matter to you?  Generally, the blogs that have mentioned the update have seen a 1-3 rank increase.  

It’ll be fairly easy to include your blog in these search engines, with a simple pinging setup or an RSS feed submission.  However, a few of these approach the definition of being a blog directory, which wasn’t my intention of highlighting.

The blog-dedicated search engines listed below help searchers discover new blogs and resources, as well as keeps them updated on their favorite bloggers.

1. Google Blog Search – blogsearch.google.com (Google-styled) or search.blogger.com (Blogger-styled)
   • About: Both search engines have the same search results, however they feature a slightly different interface.  Results include all blogs, in addition to those published through Blogger and results are continually updated in various languages.  Advanced search also provided.
   • Languages supported: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, Swedish, Malay, Polish, Thai, Indonesian, Tagalog, Turkish, Vietnamese, and others.Getting your blog listed: Follow instructions provided on the Blog Search Pinging Service page, but most blogs are automatically added using pinging services built into the blog platform.
   • Other info: Includes blogs dating to around June 2005, PR: 7 (Google version); 3 (Blogger version)



2. Ask Blogs Search – http://blogsearch.ask.com
   • About: Includes various options from the Bloglines data with the search technology of ExpertRank and Ask.com.  The results also feature the ability to show results sorted by date, popularity, or relevance, by posts, feeds, or news.  Binoculars shows a preview of the last five posts from a feed and you are able to easily subscribe and post the feeds/search results as you find them, for future reference.
   • Languages supported: Ask.com sites include U.S., Deutschland, Espana, France, Italia, Japan, Nederland, and UK.
   • Getting your blog listed: No specific instructions listed, likely automatic, generated form web results.
   • Other info: Launched in June 2006, PR: 8



3. Technorati Blog Search – search.technorati.com (separate page) or technorati.com/search (integrated version)
   • About: As the leader in blog tracking, Technorati allows you to keep track of blog news, pingbacks/trackbacks, and who favorites your blog, using the search engines provided.  Advanced search also available.
   • Languages supported: Worldwide, primarily targets U.S. market.
   • Getting your blog listed: You must first create an account or configure your publishing tool/ping configurations.
   • Other info: Currently tracking 100+ million blogs, PR: 4-5



4. Blog Search – blog-search.com
   • About: Blog Search is owned by Jayde and incorporated in 1998.  The blog search serves as a source for searching blogs, adding your own blog, or grabbing an RSS feed on the blog topic of your choice.  Includes more than 17,000 blogs.
   • Languages supported: Unknown, primarily English.
   • Getting your blog listed: You must become a member to submit your blog/RSS feed.
   • Other info: Catalogues blogs by category (directory-like), PR: 3



5. Ice Rocket Blog Search – icerocket.com
   • About: IceRocket is a privately owned and operated search engine has innovative blog search technology to search the blogosphere.  On the main page, you’ll find several areas to discover the top videos, movies, searches, and other various tools under the IceRocket name. 
   • Languages supported: Primarily English, as the company is based in Texas.
   • Getting your blog listed: Enter your URL to be indexed or include the ping address in your XML-RPC area of your weblog software.
   • Other info: PR: 6



6. Blog Search Engine – blogsearchengine.com
   • About: Blog Search Engine is a search engine of blogs, using the Google Blog Search bar.  It presents you with more than ten million blogs which are relevant toy our search queries.
   • Languages supported: Primarily English.
   • Getting your blog listed: Automatically added if you have been added to the Google Blog Search previously.
   • Other info: The site occasionally reviews other high quality blogs from around the world, PR: 4



7. Blogdigger – blogdigger.com
   • About: Blogdigger provides several areas of blog content search types such as by date, relevance, links, media, groups, and local.  A toolbar is also available for quicker access to the services.
   • Languages supported: Primarily English.
   • Getting your blog listed: No specific instructions provided.
   • Other info: PR: 7



8. Bloglines Blog Search – bloglines.com/search
   • About: Bloglines provides a number of free online services for searching, subscribing, creating, and sharing news feeds, blogs, and rich web content.  Their blog search allows you to search for posts, feeds, citations, or the web, in coordination with Ask.com’s search technologies.
   • Languages supported: Worldwide, focused on English blogs.
   • Getting your blog listed: Likely will already be included, but has more specific results if you have an account.
   • Other info: PR: 8



9. BlogPulse – blogpulse.com
   • About: BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs, owned by Nielsen BuzzMetrics.  BlogPulse combines a search engine that analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere and includes a set of Buzz-Tracking tools, a look at world trends, daily blog stats, a trend search, a conversation tracker, blogger profiles, as well as a showcase of tools for bloggers.
   • Languages supported: Worldwide, once again focused on English blogs.
   • Getting your blog indexed: Blogs are indexed at most once per day, you must first add it on the submission page.
   • Other info: PR: 7



10. BlogScope – blogscope.net
    • About: BlogScope is an analysis and visualization tool for the blogosphere which is being developed as part of a research project at the University of Toronto.  It currently tracks more than twenty-one million blogs with 241.09 million posts.  It offers numerous unique features including popularity curves, identification of information bursts, related themes, and geographical search.
    • Languages supported: English, others also supported, except images use English text.
    • Getting your blog indexed: Blogs indexed semi-automatically as widgets may get your blog indexed more quickly.
    • Other info: PR: 5



11. Plazoo Blog Search – plazoo.com
    • About: Plazoo is a term that means “a place to search”, and allows you to search for content across multiple blog categories and displays the latest news on the main page form top news blogs.
    • Languages supported: (based in the Netherlands) – Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Polish, and Russian
    • Getting your blog indexed: Submit your blog on the submission page.
    • Other info: PR: 6, more of a directory

More information can be found here.

Beginning in June of 2007, Google changed their algorithm, making more recent articles from blogs, in particular, appear at the top of the search results. Since then, more lower-quality (spam) pages began displaying more frequently than higher-ranked pages such as Wikipedia. Before this change, new blog posts took much longer to be displayed, often hours, and today blog posts will be displayed within a few minutes. Page Rank, which is an important factor in determining the ranking of sites, is almost completely disregarded with the speed sites are being listed at. 

Many saw a huge flaw in the algorithm with Google’s latest logo linking to results for the twenty-five year anniversary of in the invention of TCP/IP. The first result was for a Digg page linking to the second result, which is a spam blog set up simply to take advantage of the flaws. Out of the first ten results, only one consists of a fairly decent non-spam result, with the Wikipedia article appearing on the second page.

Perhaps Google will realize the greater problems this created, tweaking their search algorithm to include both recent and higher ranked/older pages. Possibly create further distinction between them – instead of simply listing the date. Other ideas may be to create a ‘Recently Added’ or similar tab as in the case of the blog search. For now you’ll just have to modify your searching to ‘January 1 tcp/ip+wikipedia’.

[via: Google Operating System]

AOL – A simple flash animation of the ball dropping and some confetti. 

Ask – Balloons line the top of the search page. Later, they used flash to animate the page with the balloons located at the bottom and ‘happy new year-related’ balloons falling from the top. Youtube video courtesy Search Engine Roundtable. 

Dogpile – The Dogpile mascot celebrating the new year. 

Google – As usual, Google used a logo change integrating the holiday into their name. The logo also celebrates the milestone invention (TCP/IP) leading to the modern internet which was invented on January 1, 1983. 

Yahoo! – Yet another flash animation of the characters celebrating the new year.