Posts Tagged ‘research’
Blog SEO: Research Keywords Like a Pro with SpyFu
Driving traffic to your blog should not be your only priority but should be a big part of your overall strategy. You can have the best content in the world, but people are not able to see what you have to offer, you are not going to achieve the success that you deserve. I know a lot of people want to believe in those Cinderella story when you blog for years and finally get recognized for your work. I hate to break it to you, but unless you take time to promote your blog, you are not going to get the appreciation you are hoping for.
One way to drive passive traffic to your blog is by optimizing your blog for the search engines. I am not talking about creating splogs but rather using relevant keywords that people are searching for in each post. Many bloggers choose to go after those generate keyword phrases, but there is a lot of traffic to be gotten if you target those long-tail keywords in your posts. The good thing about long-tail keywords is that you don’t have to sound like a robot to use them in your posts. The traffic per keyword may not be much, but if you use enough of them, your traffic adds up.
SpyFu is one of the best tools to dig up those long-tail keywords for your blog. It may not be as famous as WordTracker and Keyword Discovery, but it provides you with a wealth of features to help you optimize each and every post for highly-targeted keywords. For starters, SpyFu allows you to spy on other blogs and websites and find out what keywords they are using to generate traffic. You can also take a look at their ads, their PPC keywords, and even their estimate advertising budget to find out what your competitors are focusing on.
SpyFu Kombat allows you to find out which channels other bloggers are focusing on and what you can do to match or better their efforts in those channels. You can always download the keywords that other blogs are using and find out which ones you can use in your future blog posts.
If you push your blog using Google Adwords, SpyFu has you covered in that area as well. But I personally have used SpyFu to come up with blogging ideas, find out what my competitors are doing, and find keywords that people are interested in talking about. Ultimately, SpyFu is an affordable premium service that can help you write more targeted posts and get more passive traffic in the long run.
Note: SpyFu is a premium keyword research service and while you can use the free version to get some research done, to take advantage of some of the above mentioned features, you will need to become a paying member (thanks @searchguru).
Find What’s Hot On the Web With OneRiot
I have mentioned time and time again on this blog how much doing research means to my business and my blog. If you are not researching and finding new tools to incorporate into your daily routine, you are going to fall behind. As a blogger, you should always be aware of what the Web is buzzing about. You can always use tools such as BlogPulse and PopURL to find out what’s hot in the blogging community, but that’s not merely enough. Thanks to services such as OneRiot, you can figure out what people are tweeting or digging and how popular their posts are.
What I like about OneRiot is not just the fact that it aggregates mentions from Twitter and Digg, but it also shows you who has “faved” each story where and how you can do the same. Whether it’s re-tweeting or digging a story, OneRiot provides you with the proper option. OneRiot is still a new service, and it may not be as polished as Topsy, but it certainly has a lot of potential. There is always going to be a need for a service that aggregates results from all social media sources. OneRiot is certainly on the right track.
Your take: how would your improve OneRiot?
