I have a friend who has a vegetarian recipe web site. It’s a blog in which he posts every now and then with a new recipe. He asked for some advice on generating traffic to it. My first piece of advice to him was to make more posts. For a blog to be an effective marketing vehicle, you must post often. I recommend a minimum of 3x per week. But at the very least, regardless of what business you are in, at least post once a week. That is the rock bottom minimum for your blog to be legitimate.

But while I was checking out his site, making suggestions for his title and whatnot, I decided to do a little keyword research just to see what kind of traffic there was related to vegetarian and vegan recipes. As was expected, there was a fair amount of traffic for broad terms like “vegetarian recipes”. Competition for those broad phrases was also fairly stiff. But what I found interesting is that there were a lot of less trafficked terms that had much less competition.

Our primary keyword tool is Nichebot’s Keyword Tracker. The main way it counts competition is the number of web pages with the keyword in the title. Search engines place much stock in web page titles. If you have a web page indexed with a specific keyword in the title that few other web pages have, that page will likely rank highly for that keyword, regardless of external factors such as the number of backlinks the site has.

So I found lots of keywords with just a few searches, but also just a few competitors. My suggestion to my friend was to use those “long-tail” keywords as the basis for future blog posts. As a hypothetical example, if our data showed that there were ten searches for the phrase “low fat vegetarian lasagna”, with eight competitors listed, then a blog posted with the title “Low fat vegetarian lasagna” would have an excellent chance of generating a first page ranking.

A first page search engine ranking for a search phrase being used by a few people is way better than a page 23 ranking for a search phrase that lots of people are using. You have to think specifics. Think niches.

Think in terms of finding keywords you can dominate and serving content directed toward small pockets of people, rather than trying to compete for broad, general phrases against thousands of other web sites. Keyword research can help you find those small pockets of people.

Getting back to the vegetarian recipe example, if my friend were to use the long-tail keywords as a guide to what kinds of recipes to post, eventually he would have a large collection of blog posts (and corresponding web pages) that focused on keywords with little competition. And he would have some real nice search engine rankings to go along with it.

If you would like some help performing keyword research for your web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.