I am always looking for new techniques to increase my pull of natural search traffic. Blogging regularly is one of these and sometimes I am left scratching my head about what to write. More importantly, when I do have a topic, how can I craft it to attract the traffic and convert it into a sale.

One way of attracting traffic is by using keywords in your content. It’s an important part of defining your content. I am not a big one for going over the top with keyword [over] saturation though.

Plain attraction by using keyword saturation is a tactic that works for many affiliate sites, that simply rely on numbers of visitors, but for a business website we are not interested in simply attracting traffic - we want leads, or sales. All to often a company may pop up in the search engine, you visit the site and can’t make head or tail of what they are saying due to improper use of keywords.

The idea of using keywords is this is that you define a key-word, or key-phrase and use it within your content to attract search engine traffic. ie. If a search engine can see your page has the word ‘basingstoke’ in for instance, it can establish that you have a value against that phrase. So, if someone searches for the term, you may appear.

Of course, you are competing with everyone else who wants to be found for the same phrase.

Recent advice is to use Long Tail search terms. These are more specific terms and utilise longer key phrases, “website designer in Basingstoke”.

Keyword Research

You can use free keyword tools, such as Wordtracker or Google… along with everyone else, or you could use variations of the same phrase you want to be found for.

One tip I have never really thought about too much is to craft your Blog posts completely around a key phrase or phrases. It’s not my idea by the way - credit to Om4.

This is exceptionally useful with topical issues that affect your business, or locality based articles. I often take a generic story and put a Basingstoke angle on it for my local Basingstoke Business News website. eg. This story is for a company rolling out broadband in three towns; Basingstoke is just one of them.

This Blogging technique also allows you to build additional anchor text links to your web pages. (anchor text is the text you select as the link to another page - eg. web consultant in Basingstoke).

To find what’s happening for certain key phrases, or in my home town, I often use Google News search and Blog Search. I also use Google Alerts to get updates sent regularly to my e-mail inbox for certain more obscure ‘keywords’.

By taking your topic, or source words, you can begin to craft articles and Blog Posts to answer peoples questions, attract traffic and push it through to your selling pages.