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Increased search engine traffic means more people reading your content. But, if you’re lazy, like me, trying to get more traffic to your blog, without spoiling your content may seem too much like hard work.

Until recently I didn’t bother trying to drive search engine traffic to my blog at all. Then I discovered that it’s quite effortless, and you don’t need to ruin your content at all. And now I rank on the first page of Google for many keyphrases and you can too. Just follow these simple steps:

Concentrate On Keyphrases As Opposed To Keywords: Optimise for keyphrases, not keywords. Eg: Instead of cookery, business or money, choose “cookery for dummies”, “improve business growth”, or “making money at home”.

Remember, each time you write a post, you can choose a different phrase according to your content.

Titles Are Important: Aim to include your keyphrase in your blog post/article and somewhere in the first paragraph of your post. But, don’t worry about including it in the remainder of the post. If you choose your phrases carefully, you won’t need to do any more to compete.

Have The Title In Your URL: Does your title appear in your URL like this: http://cathlawson.com/blog/2008/02/28/5-business-writing-tips-you-can-profit-from/ If not, go into Wordpress and change your settings. Click “options” then “permalinks” and change the settings from default to date and name based.

Keep It Real: Don’t optimise every single post for the search engines. Remember that you also need titles which will appeal to social networks and your regular readers, who will be viewing them through a feed reader. Also, write the post first then look for a suitable keyphrase. This way, your writing will appear more natural, as you won’t be trying to write a post around a particular phrase.

Who’s Looking For you? You need to know what keyphrases people are searching for, before you can optimise your titles. I use Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com) as it brings up hundreds of different options.

What’s the Competition Like: Wordtracker will tell you how much competition there is for each keyphrase, but you want to know how good that competition is. Since it’s your titles you’re optimising, you need to know how many competitors have that keyphrase in their title.

Here’s how to do that:

To discover how many websites have optimised the title, type the following into Google search:

allintitle: keyphrase

allintitle: florida weddings

The search results show that 34,100 websites have the search phrase “florida weddings” in the title.

But wordtracker also shows that a lot of people are also searching for “florida beach weddings”

And if I type:

allintitle: florida beach weddings

And I discover that only 2210 sites have that phrase in the title. And when I click on the first few results, none of them have the phrase in their first paragraph, which is even better. So, this is obviously a better title to choose.

Make The Title Appeal To Real People: Remember when you’re optimising titles for search engine traffic, you still need real people to click on that title. Now, having the keyphrase close to the beginning of the title will give you a better chance of ranking higher, but it won’t necessarily attract more clicks.

You could simply use Florida Beach Weddings as the title. But, you might attract more clicks if you use: Florida Beach Weddings: The Ultimate Guide; or Planning Florida Beach Weddings: 10 Must Do’s.

And that’s it – it’s not complicated and it works. Have a go yourself and keep checking your stats to see where your traffic comes from and how you’re ranking. Then you’ll begin to get a feel for how good your competition is for particular phrases and what works and what doesn’t.

If you have any questions – please feel free to ask in the comments section.

Useful Resources

All In One SEO Pack is a useful plugin if you have a Wordpress blog. I’m too lazy to use it to its full potential though. So, if you want to take it a step further, check out this excellent guide by Ciaran. How To Herd Organic Search Traffic To Your Blog

If you want to learn even more about SEO – check out Aaron Wall’s SEO book.

And if you want to get all the SEO tools and gadgets you can lay your hands on – here’s 136 SEO tools