There’s almost no question that your blog will receive some traffic from search engines. In many cases it will be the primary source of traffic. One way to improve the traffic to your blog is to optimize your posts for search. The following three tools help me to search optimize my blog posts for increased traffic.
ScribeSEO
ScribeSEO is an amazing tool that analyzes your blog posts for a number of factors that influence search rankings. Scribe is available as a WordPress plugin and can be used across a variety of other platforms. One thing that is really nice about Scribe is that it will analyze what you’ve already written and give you feedback and recommendations by showing you what search engines will think about what you’ve already written.
Another thing Scribe does that I really like is that it interprets the most appropriate tags for your post. While the recommendations are not 100%, it is often a great place to start with tags.
Pricing is subscription based, which I don’t really like but the tool is virtually indispensible for me. I chose the starter kit as that tends to be enough for me every month.
Also see the review posted by Brian Clark, of copyblogger.com
Google Instant
Google instant is a really interesting technology that Google just released. If you run a search on google.com, you can see results as you type, instantly! What’s cool about this is that when used in conjunction with Google search suggest you can get some really good ideas for keywords to target.
For instance:
Let’s say you blog about Social Media. Social Media is a very competitive term but “Social Media statistics by state” might not be. When looking for an opportunity to blog about something relevant but less competitive, you can jump on Google, check what terms are coming up in the search suggestions by starting with a term. Start with Social Media, see what comes up, choose something from the suggestions. Then after that search, add a space after the last term in the search, see what comes up, choose from that. You’ll begin to isolate topics that are in the long tail. The benefit Google Instant adds to the search suggestions is that you can immediately see what comes up with those long tail terms. Are websites coming up? Blogs? Is there anything you can learn from the top results?
Google keyword tool
The Google keyword tool is a great place to research. It is often used to research keywords for Adwords campaigns, but there’s no rules against doing some intel for your blog. What’s nice about the keyword tool is that it gives information about competitiveness of keywords, global search volume AND local search volume. Through some careful selection, you can begin to target less competitive keywords and generate more traffic by speaking to those topics.
What other tools do you use?
Let’s hope you find this post because this is my ScribeSEO score for this post:
