Okay, I\’m just keyword stuffing my blog post, to see how many visitors I get by using these keywords in my title. These are all very hot keywords according to Google Trends.
Here are the trends for MySpace, YouTube, and Wikipedia.
But the title wouldn\’t be complete without including \”free\” and \”download.\” I can\’t seem to find any search terms on Google Trends that get more searches than they do. I compare \”free\” and \”download\” to \”yahoo\”, \”google\”, and \”myspace.\” Interesting results.
Anyone searching on Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, or Google Blog Search for any of these keywords will find this post, at least for the next few minutes until others post entries that also have these keywords in them. I wonder if I\’ll see a spike in traffic.
I don\’t believe in keyword stuffing. I\’m doing this just to make a point. (I did blog about an effect press release that I saw the other day that used keyword stuffing to drive traffic to its site.)
But I do believe in careful keyword selection. Every time you post a blog entry, write a news article, or create a title for a web page, you really ought to make sure that your title does make sense, both to readers and to searchers.
Make sure that the keywords you are choosing are actually popular keywords. They should also actually match the content of your post, unlike my poor example here.
I really do check Google Trends most of the time before posting. For example, yesterday I wondered if \”online marketing\” or \”internet marketing\” would make a better title.
Clearly, internet marketing won easily.
My title was \”Next 3 days: free online conference on internet marketing\”
I checked \”3\” vs \”three\” and \”online conference\” vs several other options.
So, with a 1-2 minute check of Google Trends, I\’m guessing that I increased the odds that anyone using a blog search engine would find that post by about 50-100%.
My traffic has been going up lately, but I can\’t tell if it is because I\’m posting more frequently or if my post titles are better. But I\’m going to keep using Google Trends to do this, because I think it will make a really big difference long term on my site traffic.
When the bloggers in our world history blogger network all start taking an extra minute or two before each post to check their keyword selection, I believe that the traffic there will increase dramatically.
I actually hope someone will create a WordPress plug-in that will access Google Trends within the interface. Maybe it could grade my headline while I\’m writing my article, and then return some alternatives (by checking a thesaurus in the background as well as querying Google Trends) and then let me know the best ones before I finalize my post.
What do you think about keyword stuffing and careful keyword selection? Do you know any journalists or newspapers or online publishers that train their writers to do this? And if so, are their tools out there that get into the daily workflow?
8 thoughts on “MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia and Free Downloads”
I think (since you asked) that both keyword stuffing and ‘careful keyword selection’ ultimately lessen the value of the internet. Great writers don’t consult Google Trends to pick their words. If average writers do, the Internet will trend towards a bland center. If only your stable of bloggers do, they might get more traffic, but they will be stunting their own development as thinkers and hurting the long-term value of that traffic. Consensus rarely results in brilliance.
That’s what I say.
I wrote a paper when I was at BYU comparing the theses of the most academically well-respected professors versus the up and coming “celebrity professors.” In most cases, the famous older department heads gave ungoogleable titles to their papers, i.e. the respected religion professors would always put Jn. 5:13 or Jn. V:13, while the younger celebrities would naturally put John 5:13, making them ubiquitious in search results. I’m not saying that was intentional, but almost 100% correlative and therefore presumably causative. (People search google using the colloquialisms of the particular google user, so we should talk like 18-40 year old BA-holding coastal-living white people if our site is in english.)
Hi Paul
Just out of interest, did you see much of a result using all those keywords in the post?
A good site for checking out hot search keywords is http://www.popforty.com/search/. It pulls together in one place the top daily and weekly searches from Yahoo, Google, AOL …
Interesting blog, I thought about how this will drive traffic to my, “myspace” site,
and I may craft something to see.
Hi paul,
I am not sure I follow you. If you use terms that many other people use, does that mean that you will be more likely to be found? After all, you do have more competition?
[…] I recently saw Paul Allen, who has one of my favorite blogs, write a post about targeting our blog entries to web searches.
Hello Paul,
I just blogged about how much I liked this entry. I hadn’t read the comments yet, but I am finding I disagree with them. We live in a world of markets. Look at computers, it isn