We gearing up to market our community of blog post ideas that we call Seeds and we’ve been doing our keyword research using Google Adwords Keyword Tool and we’ve noticed at 1,600 people a month search for ‘blog post ideas’.
Although not a huge volume of searches when compared to terms like ‘blog promotion’ with 8,100 searches and blog marketing with 110,000 searches it’s not a hugely competitive term and it’s in our sweet spot. If we’re not a good result for bloggers looking for a great blog post idea then I don’t know who is. So why am I telling you all this?
I have decided I want to rank for it in the natural search results and have written this post to illustrate what I have done and to allow you to see the results over the coming months. The plan is to show you how keyword research combined with targeted content, page optimization and a few external links can create free traffic.
So what’s the plan?
Stage 1 – You’re reading it
- I have tried to write a post that is interesting and useful and worth reading and linking to
- The meta page title (on the browser) contains the target keyword
- The h1 heading contains the target keyword
- The first paragraph contains the target keyword and it has been emphasized using bold text to tell spiders the word is more important than standard text
- The post is tagged with the keyword
Stage 2 – Votes and context
- I need votes from other websites in the form of links and ideally the anchor of the link will contain the keywords ‘blog post ideas’
- So the Plan A is to plant a Seed and see if we can attract some Buzz
- I have a Plan B but I am not going to go there yet as I hope I don’t need it and want to save it for when I have a go at ranking top for ‘blog promotion’
Stage 3 – Day 0
Our ranking on Wednesday 17 February 2010 is outside the top 500.
Let’s see what happens.
Any guesses how long it will take to get to # 1?
To take some advice that was handed from Google SEO Matt Cutts… you should really adjust your permalink structure to the post name, rather than include the date. The date is irrelevant, especially on a topic like this and you will already list in your layout template when the post was published. I just covered a little about this on my WordPress related site called WPAddict.net -> http://wpaddict.net/what-is-the-best-permalink-structure-in-wordpress/
This is the best permalink structure suggested by most SEO experts.
Will be buzzing your article.
[...] blogging, writing Finding blog post ideas is not difficult. Seeded Buzz wrote an article called Blog post ideas that prevent writer’s block, which covered the fact that they noticed 1600 people a month were searching with the keywords [...]
I’m not sure how long it will take to number one but I’m hoping this site really takes off in the next few months. The idea is pretty solid, combining content inspiration with the gold standard of links. It will be interesting to see it when it reaches a solid, critical mass of enough members to really get things going.
Meanwhile, seven months. That’s my guess.