5 Best Ways Bloggers Can Do Keyword Research

Your online Money Making business highly depends upon your understanding about two things in particular, first being the most productive domain to start with, and next to it is an effective Keyword research. Keywords are the most powerful ingredient of yourSearch Engine Optimization which drives traffic to your site from the search results. However, attracting a considerable traffic to your site/blog is directly related to your knowledge about the keywords utility. This means that you need to think from your potential visitor’s point of view that what he might be looking for. Effective keyword research does not only drive traffic, in fact beside increasing your followers, it helps boosting your overall site statistics, while on the other hand, generating huge revenue.

Things to Take Care of

As the competition is increasing in every domain, your potential readers/clients/ followers might not know about your existence even. This means that they might not be searching your company on the search engines, in fact, they would look for the services that the domain you own, provides. Now if you are smart enough to show your expertise on SEO, mind it that your readers are not going to anywhere else.

Before we go on with the most useful tips, you need to discover some most common keywords for your niche by answering the following questions.

1. Keywords to Describe Your Site?

2. What’s Unique about your product/services?

3. What makes you better than competitors in your domain?

Once the Idea is clear with sufficient relevant keywords in hand, Now all you need learn is how to do a unique keyword research for your articles to make them SEO friendly each time.

1. Use Google product search

The first name that clicks when you need to search anything is obviously ‘Google’, so why not to start with it? Click on Google Products and enter the major key phrase in the search box. For example, if you are writing an article on London Olympics (the most happening these days), Just like, we have been writing on our Sister Blog, and you will see a drop down with lots of relevant phrases that you can consider your keywords and use them in your post.

Not only this, but you can also click on a particular, most suited phrase to know more about it and find out what is pre-written and what is attracting more traffic. Visitors who come to your blog with the following keywords are determined to know all about you are sharing, decreasing the bounce rate.

2. Use Shopping.com

Just following the same procedure that we shared in tip #1, go to Shopping.com and search for the same topic London Olympics. You will see new phrases appearing in the search, giving you new ideas, first of all, and secondly providing you with a list of keywords that you can include in your post and enjoy targeted visitors who want to search everything about London Olympics.

3.Use Ebay.com

Ebay is yet another great platform when you are looking for worth adding keywords. Whether it’s a product or a service, Ebay is rich enough to hold a great variety on it. Repeat the similar activity that we did for the above two, and you will see all new keywords appearing.

4. Try Amazon.com

Amazed with how easy it is to collect keywords for your post? If not, then try Amazontoo. Although following the same procedure, the results are somehow much satisfactory. Enter your main keyword in the search box and you will see set of phrases, that can turn out be the most successful keywords of your post.

5. yahoo product search

Just like Google Product Search, Yahoo is playing it safe with its product search engine, though not that effective as Google, still trying to survive. You can expect some Good keywords with this method too. With the scrolling arrows, you can always explore more phrases to choose best suited keywords for your post.

Keyword research is a highly recommended tip to search about and use in your blogging career. Hope the following tips turn out to be useful enough to give you more relevant keywords for your articles.

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Customize Labels Cloud in Blogger

Back in the year 2008 when Blogger.com was moving through several update phases, third party developers would often take the golden opportunity of creating widgets for BlogSpot blogs but as soon as Google rolled out massive changes to their online services, several official widgets popped out which load fast and perform well because the scripts are served by Blogger servers. Page List and label cloud/list enabled designers to create dynamic menus. Since the stylesheet was made accessible. therefore we all got a chance to play with these widgets and transform them completely in look and appearance. We shared tutorials first time on how to create dynamic menus with page list and an automatic menu with label list and today we would share a simple stylesheet that will transform the labels cloud into organized small blocks that rotate on mouse over. I must ensure you that the styles are perfectly compatible in all major browsers including IE8+.

DEMO: Look at the label cloud on the sidebar of this blog

This is how labels look in cloud display:



This is how it will look after you apply the new style.

How it works?

Each label link is nested inside a span tag followed by a class named label-size. If the font-size is not specified the widget changes font-size of each label according to its post-count. Therefore showing big and small clouds. Introducing custom styles would over-ride the exiting styles thus changing the entire look. 

Turn Random Cloud display into Blocks

The code below can be customized in several ways to create exciting label designs. You can also add background images to them.
Follow these easy steps:

1. Go to Blogger > Settings> Layouts
2. Click add a gadget and choose Labels                     
3. Inside the settings make sure to choose the cloud display. You may set other options as per your requirement. See the screenshot below as example 

Please choose to display at most 25 labels. Too much labels on homepage look awkward. Showcase your best categories only.

• Read: What are blog labels or categories?

       4.    Now save the widget and go to settings > Template
       5.     Backup your template
       6.     Click Edit html > Proceed  and search for this

]]></b:skin>

        7.   Just above it paste the following CSS code:

/*-----Custom Labels Cloud widget by www.MyBloggerTricks.com----*/
.label-size{
margin:0 2px 6px 0;
padding: 3px;
text-transform: uppercase;
border: solid 1px #C6C6C6;
border-radius: 3px;
float:left;
text-decoration:none;
font-size:10px;
color:#666;
}

.label-size:hover {
border:1px solid #6BB5FF;
text-decoration: none;
-moz-transition: all 0.5s ease-out; 
-o-transition: all 0.5s ease-out; 
-webkit-transition: all 0.5s ease-out; 
-ms-transition: all 0.5s ease-out; 
transition: all 0.5s ease-out;
-moz-transform: rotate(7deg); 
-o-transform: rotate(7deg); 
-webkit-transform: rotate(7deg); 
-ms-transform: rotate(7deg); 
transform: rotate(7deg); 
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Matrix(
                    M11=0.9961946980917455, M12=-0.08715574274765817, M21=0.08715574274765817, M22=0.9961946980917455, sizingMethod='auto expand');
zoom: 1; 
}

.label-size a  {
text-transform: uppercase;
float:left;
text-decoration: none;
}
.label-size a:hover  {
text-decoration: none;
}

          8.  Save your template
         9.    All done!
Visit your blogs and see the labels completely transformed to small neatly crafted rectangular boxes. If in case you want the label boxes to be of random sizes depending on the post-count then simply delete font-size:10px; from the above code.

Need help?

I am sure the installation of this tweak wont trouble you a lot, if in case you needed help in changing the font colors on active, hover and visited modes then let me know. By default the visited link will turn black, unlinked and would also not rotate. Click any of your label links and see that page to check this effect.
I will be posting normal tutorials on plugins and widgets and I have got some new SEO tweaks for blogger blogs that would further improve your SERP ranking. Hope you like it guys

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Google PageRank

Well there comes just a new update on Google's Page popularity algo on2nd August 2012. The PageRank toolbar has started showing new ranks for all websites worldwide. The update this time seems a major one and there could be no further expectation of any new changes within the next 24 hours. The last update was on May 3rd and third last was on February 6th. The duration gap has now become constant. Google rolls out these updates quarterly, after every three months. The next update and last update of this year is expected anytime between November 1-10 2012. PageRank as you all know is a numerical weighting scale between 0-10. Websites that are recommended by related niches via backlinks rank higher on PR scale and get the benefit of faster crawl and index rate.  Blogs with higher PR are crawled faster compared to those with lower PageRank. For example a PR 7 webpage is crawled several times per minute compared to a PR 5 page that is crawled once every minute. The faster the robot crawls your pages the greater the chances for you to drive organic traffic from Google and build readership.

The PR for MBT remains at 4.0 and same is true for SEM which remains at 2.0. My main focus these last months have been Alexa Rank and I must congratulate all our readers for taking MBT to attain an Alexa Rank of 7K. MBT now counts amongst the very few Google blogs that has AlhamdulillAh crossed the 10K boundary. SEM has amazingly reached 29K within just 6 months and is improving daily. 

How important is PageRank?

PageRank is a successful link analysis algorithm that differentiates Google from its Market competitors. This algo is and was the backbone of Google's popularity when Larry Page and Sergey brin  first introduced this new giant search engine's functionality in September 1998. SEO professionals and internet marketers have now started measuring a website's popularity in terms of PageRank and Alexa Rank. PR is good to attract paid product reviews. Business owners do pay well if your blog has a stable PageRank, at least 3.0

But PageRank comes last in my priority list. Read further to find why.

Google Web Spam Head, Matt Cutts himself says that what is more important is your Content and not the PageRank. Watch this useful video:

Why your PageRank is not increasing?

Your PageRank did not increase? If yes then don't get frustrated and start understanding the concept first. PageRank is not sequential and surely not proportional to the number of incoming links. It is an automatic system that depends on quality links pointing your main domain. I have already written a detailed post that explains every single question revolving around your mind:

• Read: Three Reasons Why your PageRank is not increasing

Do you need several backlinks?

It's a myth that PR depends on getting hundreds of backlinks from niche websites. A single link from a high PR blog can change your rank from 0 to 4. Some guest authorshave already experienced this with us before. You must not waste your precious time commenting on forums and blogs just for the sake of low quality backlinks. Keep yourself limited to just 4-5 blogs that you may read and interact with. Build a relationship with your favorite authors and once you succeed in winning a respect in their eyes for yourselves, you can then start guest posting at these blogs without any hesitation.

Quick PR Formula:

• Guest post on at least 4 Blogs (where you comment) with PR > 3
• Make your Post of at least 1K words
• Make sure your blog is well designed, presented and contains at least 25 posts. You must provide a solid reason so that the author may offer a link.
• Produce a post that is related to the author's niche
• Make it presentable, sound mature and to the point
• Never try to promote yourself or your blog on a guest post, talk about the topic only.
• Add images and video to make the post stand out

No one would neglect such a great post. Try it.

Do not fool yourselves

Site rankings do count well but give your first priority to quality content only. Write more and publish more. Do not waste your online working hours in finding tweaks to somehow increase your PageRank. Instead do a lot of reading and Work on your SEO skills and build readership. There are many blogs online with PR 6.0 but they are not well versed with marketing strategies to use in order to market their blog and make a living out of it. Neither PR nor Alexa are as important as readership. I have always emphasized on the following priority list:

1. Readership First          (i.e. Posting quality content)
2. Traffic second              
3. Alexa third
4. PageRank Fourth

Advertisers look for a return value in your blogs, if you fail to offer that you fail to win a lucrative income. Internet Marketers look at your niche topic first and then they analyze your readership, fan followers and finally your site rankings.

• Read: How to find sponsors for your blog?

What is the Maximum PageRank achievable by a blog?

So far blogs that are managed by a single author or 2-6 authors could succeed in achieving a maximum of PR 6.0. I have not come across any blog with zero investment to have attained a number greater than six. Normally large businesses that have strong marketing backup rank high because the investment is huge. Blogs like search engine land, seomoz, mashable and techcrunch are corporate websites that have several hired authors who write tons of articles per week. Many people are involved behind its promotion and management and they are often backed by both print and electronic media.

So if you are a dedicated blogger then achieving 6 should be your goal. Remember Pagerank does not decide which blog is good and which is poor, its only an algorithm that tells whether a site is well recommended online or not. Reputation of any blog depends only in its strong reader base and quality updates.

What's your PageRank?

Do share with us your updated PR values and feel free to ask any SEO related question. I just hope this new update was a calm one for most of you. If you have seen a sudden positive jump then well done, if your Rank remains the same then thumbs up but if your PR has dropped then don't get demotivated and start working on the simple PR formula we shared above. Nothing works better then this technique so make yourself prepared for some quality guest posts and work with patience because you have a lot of time. i.e. 3 Months. The next update could occur anytime between 1-10 November 2012.  

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