Brainstorming Keywords for your Blog

The first step in the process of developing a successful keyword strategy is what we call “brainstorming”. At this step, you’re trying to make a list of your candidate search terms. One of the biggest mistakes that new webmasters and site owners make is trying to focus on a single word (like “cars”) or phrase (like “florida homes”), and try to build a website that will rank well. These kind of search terms are too general and thus very competitive. These kind of terms are difficult for all search engines to handle well (in terms of giving good results to searchers), and hardly worth the trouble in the first place.

Let’s say that you spend hundreds of hours building, tweaking and promoting your site and you managed to get a #1 ranking for “real estate”. Unless you sell real estate of all kinds in every part of the world, a big amount of the traffic you’ll get will come from people who are looking for something you don’t actually have. Although you may not optimize your blog for those keywords, it’s very important that you know what they are, as it applies to your blog too.

As you work through this article, make a list of the 5-10 major keywords that describe your blog. These should be mostly single words (like “cars”), with perhaps a couple of commonly-used phrases (like “real estate”) mixed in. These major keywords will form the backbone of your site design effort, since they will help define the themes around which you will organize your blog’s content. Don’t worry too much about them right now, because this is one of the many cases where you can easily correct an omission in future. In other words, if you forget a major keyword today, you can do something about it next month and so on.