Yesterday we discussed how the long tail can be one of your best allies. Coincidentally, Jim Karter wrote a post yesterday with a great suggestion on how to discover more great long tail keywords to blog about.
His suggestion is very simple — keep track of what people are searching for on your site, then blog about the items that haven’t been discussed yet. He is using the “Fluid Dynamics Search Engine” script, but there are other options as well. If you use WordPress, there is a great little plug-in called Search Meter that will record all of the searches performed on your site. In addition, I highly recommend that you use the service provided by HitTail. They track your incoming visits and suggest new keywords based on the previous visitors. Between Search Meter and HitTail, you’ll quickly have a long list of new topics to blog about!
If you’re more aggressive, you can even write your own script to track searches. On our church site, I’ve done just that. I built a custom search engine using MySQL’s fulltext search, and I record each query in our database (along with date, time and number of results found). I breeze through it from time to time to see what I’m missing.
Some of the things I’ve discovered in the past year or so:
- People wanted information about having weddings at the church, so I built a page for that.
- People can’t spell our staff member’s names correctly, so I added a bunch of misspelled keywords to each staff member’s page. For example, you can find me if you search for “Mickey” or “Micky” or “Micki”.
- People searched for “www.google.com” quite a bit. That’s odd to me, but I built a proper landing page to help them out.
The list could go on and on. By tracking the searches, I can not only improve the quality of the search engine, but I can build the content that people are already looking for.
The longer you can stretch out your tail, the better!
Very interesting thoughts about analysis. May I include some of these into our advice in the Internet Evangelism Day’s church website design self-assessment tool which helps churches build more effective sites, especially in terms of reaching outsiders.
blessings
Tony
You should check SeoDigger.com. It shows the list of keywords that a website’s ranking well for. This keyword research tool is most useful for those who’d either want to earn from AdSense or use paid ad campaigns for their websites.
Tony – Absolutely. I’ve used that tool before, and I love it!
G. – Thanks for the link. I’ll check it out.
Looking forward to your reccomendations on how to increase traffic to this Spanish language site. Thanks, W D Smith