There are nearly as many reasons for blogging as there are bloggers. Some blog because they love to write. Others blog for money. Some bloggers just want to go off on other people that are actually doing things in life.

Whatever your reason for having a blog one thing is for sure. If nobody sees what you write, well, you might as well be sharing your ideas with your parakeet. At least that way you have a chance at getting feedback.

The fact is that the vast majority of blogs simply don’t get read. That isn’t because they aren’t interesting or the information they provide isn’t helpful or valid. The reason is more likely that the blogger doesn’t understand how to get traffic to a blog or does understand but isn’t willing to put in the effort to do so.

I’ll explain. If you want the search engines to find your site and send you gobs and gobs of free traffic you have to play by their rules. That means that you need to structure your site so that they can easily “spider” it and know what it is about. Search engines do this by scanning your pages for “keywords”.

You also need to make it easy for them to find you. You do this by getting other sites to link to your blog. The search engines follow those links and voila! They find your site.

That is all fine and dandy but it isn’t just as easy as that. If you want search engines like Google to send you free traffic pages on your blog (or site) must rank within the top ten for particular keywords and keyword phrases. For simplicity let’s say that a keyword or keyword phrase is anything that a visitor might type into a search engine to find your blog.

But all keywords are not created equal. You want to give yourself the best chance of ranking for every page or post that you add to your blog. That means keyword research.

If you’ve never done any keyword research it boils down to this. Supply and demand. You want to find phrases that are relavent to your topic, that are being searched for at the search engines (demand) AND do not have many competing pages (supply) already indexed.

Rather than going into the ins and outs of keyword research here I’ll just direct you to this free resource. Not only does Matt provide you with free keyword research software but he also has free videos showing you the how to use it and the importance of keyword research.

Once you are armed with the best keywords for your topic, print out the list and stick it up somewhere that you’ll see it often. When you add a new post to your blog you’ll want to target the “low hanging fruit”. These are the keywords from your list that have high demand and lower supply. This way you’ll be giving yourself the best opportunity to get a good ranking.

Of course, there are other things that must be done to implement a good search engine optimization strategy (SEO) but targetting good keywords is a great start – and one that most (like 99%) of your competitors will miss. This doesn’t mean that every post you make must be focused on your best keywords (mine aren’t) but by keeping this list handy you’ll be constantly reminded of your best chance of success.

Check out Matt’s Free Keyword Tool and start blogging smarter.

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