We’ve already looked at how to find keywords for your blog, and how to use them to try to get search engine rankings. Today, for the last post in our series on keywords, we’re going to learn about tracking our keywords to see our success—or find areas where we could use more work.

My favorite ways to track keywords are through my web analytics programs. I use Google Analytics for my blogs. In GA, the Keywords report is under Traffic Sources>Keywords. here, they assemble all the keywords from all search engines to show the most popular keywords for your blog.

A number of other analytics packages also list the keywords people are using to find your site—103 bees, sitemeter, etc. etc.

The Quick Guide to Google Analytics for Bloggers (free PDF) has a little more on this, but here are a few new hints.

The Keywords report is found under Traffic Sources. (I’ve also added this report to my Dashboard, so I can see my top few terms whenever I log in.)

At the top of the page, there’s a nice little graph that shows off how much traffic you get from keywords. It’s pretty, but it’s not that informative. The report, below, is what we want to focus on.

Naturally, I’ve left out a lot of my “personal” data, but you get the gist: this shows how many visits you get, how long people coming from these keywords spend on your site, how many of them have never visited before, and how many of them “bounce” (leave after viewing one page). And, of course, the list of keywords people are actually using to find your site is pure gold.

But there’s way more to learn from this report. If you’ll notice, there’s a pull-down menu by the word “Keyword.” Open it and click on Landing Page.

Now, instead of the keywords people are using, you can see what pages on your site they’re going to:

(Want to know more about a specific keyword? Click on it to “drill down,” and you can even see things like where people are from that type in that keyword, what browser they’re using, how big their screen is. No joke.)

Also, if you register with Google Webmaster Tools and verify your site, they provide a report of the top queries used to reach your site—and where your site ranks for those terms. Very useful—that way, you can see how much room for improvement you have, and better choose which keywords to work on.

This report is on the default GWT dashboard for your site as well as under Your site on the web > Top search queries .

You can also find out what sites linking in to yours are using for their anchor text (the text of the link) under Your site on the web > Links to your site > Anchor text.

Also, you can learn more about how Google sees your site with the Keywords report (Your site on the web > Keywords), which lists the 200 most common keywords Google finds when it crawls your site.

Now, of course, there are tradeoffs for this. You may be granting Google access to a lot of data and tracking by using these tools. If you’re not comfortable with that, there are other solutions that don’t use Google. Yahoo Site Explorer, for example, offers lots of information on incoming links.

What do you think? What do you use to track keywords on your site? What kind of reports do you find most useful?

This series has been a simplified beginners’ guide to using keywords. It’s not a substitute for professional search engine optimization or professional SEO advice. Yeah, I can give those, but I’m a little busy these days, so I’m not really pitching my own services today.

Keys by Kit

On your site

Use the keywords you’re targeting on your site. If the keyword is really integral to the site, you might try to find a way to work it into your blog name or even URL. In the Quick Guide to Google Analytics for Blogs, I mentioned a few more places to use these keywords.

• Making it a label, tag or category on your blog
• Making it part of the navigation, like your About or Contact page
• Including it in the Title or Description of your blog
• Writing a post that sums up (and links to) all your tips (if you do this, be sure to go back through the old posts and link to the new one, as well).

And of course, use it in the text. However, write your posts with people in mind, not just search engines—write to your audience, using the words they’re using to find you.

Around the Internet

Pages on your site are a good way to start using the keywords you want to target. But to really target these keywords, you should look at ways to get links back to your site using those keywords as the text of the links (the “anchor text”).

There are a few easy ways to do this—your friends’ blogrolls, for example. Also, blog carnivals and other memes are a good way to get links where you can choose exactly what that anchor text is.

Finally, you can try to create “linkbait”—something everyone will want to link to, share, use on their sites (with links back to yours, of course). There are many forms of this—awesome articles, fun quizzes, cool widgets. If you’ve got the imagination, you can probably find someone with the skill to create it for you.

Using the keywords that search engine users enter to find sites like yours tells search engines your site is relevant for those terms—especially when that “vote” of relevance comes in the form of a link from another site. Using the keywords you’re targeting both on and off your site will help people who are looking for sites like yours, find you.

What do you think? What other ways do you get links? How else can you use your keywords on your site?

Keys by Kit

This is keyword research, the foundation of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When you work on your site using the words that people would use in search engines to find sites like yours, you can work to improve your search engine rankings.

Choosing Keywords

Choosing keywords is part art and part science. For the science part, one easy, free tool is the Google External Keyword Tool. If you’ve already chosen a niche, you should have a start on the topics and areas your blog will cover.

Once you have a few keywords to feed into the Tool, it will generate related terms, so you can find the real search terms people use. If you call it “sing at home mom,” the tool’s going to tell you that most people say “stay at home mom.”

If you can’t come up with a list of keywords on your own, the Tool can also read your site to generate relevant keywords—but be careful which page you pick (my main page right now would bring back a lot of keywords on lawn maintenance ).

I know that my cute tag line [mom's search for meaning] isn’t going to bring a whole lot of visitors (the Tool reports “not enough data” for that keyword). Keywords like [how to be a happy mom] and [mother fulfillment] also don’t get a lot of traffic. Perhaps my best bet is [moms encouragement], which has a few hundred as the traffic number, and no advertiser competition.

While we’re talking about natural search results here, and the advertiser competition has to do with the paid ads on the top and sides of the search results, you have to also look at the competition. I mean, you actually have to look at the other pages that are already ranking for those words and see if it looks like they’re trying to stay there.

If you want to rank in the top ten, [mom blog] is going to be a challenge. But maybe [knitting sahm blog] or [puppy sahm blog] or [motoX mom blog] (ooh, I’d like to see that one) would be a little less competitive.

So an ideal keyword will be:

• high volume (so you get visitors)
• relevant to your site and niche (so your visitors won’t be disappointed
• not too competitive (so you can rank high without working for a year)
• not too long (the longer it is, the less competitive it is, but the harder it will be to incorporate it into your site.

Next week, we’ll take a look at what you can do to improve your ranking for relevant keywords.

Keys by Kit