Any smart blogger starting out on the road to success knows that good traffic comes through search engine optimization. Since the dawn of the internet, marketers have sought to exploit strong Google search engine ranking positions (SERPs) in order to draw consistent traffic off of random search results. If you are starting a blog, or trying to expand on one, you will hear one consistent theme: keywords, keywords, keywords.

I have seen webmasters devote hours upon hours to finding those special keyword terms… the “make money online”s and the “how to earn”s… just to come up short when Google fails to reward their efforts. If you  somehow manage to get a top ranking by spamming your targeted phrase across the net, congratulations… you are in for some steady traffic… that is until someone else takes your place and you lose out on all your work.

In my year-or-so of blogging on the internet, I can tell you one thing… and that is forget keyword researching. Sure, make your website easier for Google to find with search engine optimization (SEO); doing that is a great move. However, if you are spending more than an hour total finding key-phrases to get search engine traffic by asking your fellow bloggers to link to your website using “make money instantly” or whatever your term may be,  you are throwing away your work time. :(

Keyword Research and SERPs are a waste of your time and money!

Worthless Research Spending - A Case Study from The Net Fool
Here’s my unintentional and unplanned case study reflecting my personal experience with trying to target keywords to my blog. First things first, traffic from search engines is not the best kind of traffic for growth. The people that come in from search engines are not going to be comprising your RSS subscriber base, which is what matters to you. People that are searching for this and that through Google or another search engine are looking for the goods, and getting out. It’s this kind of hit-and-run traffic that is generally unhealthy for your overall performance. If you want to run a popular blog, you need to start pulling readers from other community-oriented websites such as forums, other blogs and media resources.

I originally intended to target the keyword “ways to make money online” with theNetFool.com. I was told that I needed to have a keyword, something I learned later to be a complete waste of my time. Unless you are sitting on a load of cash, you are going to have a heck of a time finding people willing to spam a link to your website using your keyword text. Without hundreds, nay thousands, of networked websites all using your special phrases… you are never going to oust the big boys on a search engine term worth topping the charts on. ;)

The amount of traffic that I have received from words I have targeted is staggering. So you know what I have done? Pretty much put this all on standby. It is much better to let links come slowly and surely than to try and pound away at Google’s unknown algorithm with what some “professional” is telling you will work. Collecting keywords that look favorable with lots of searches compared to a small amount of results is a complete waste of your time and money unless you are an already experienced marketer working in Pay-Per-Click internet marketing campaigns.

What DOES work?!
If researching keywords to try and force traffic to come to your blog isn’t worth your time, then are you supposed to ignore Google traffic entirely? Absolutely not! The key is to build traffic to your website by putting out original content that has a lot of things web surfers are looking for. The bigger your blog grows, the more you will start to see these terms popping up and making you rich.

What do I mean by this? Build content-rich content? This essentially means write useful material on uncharted waters that people are interested in but might not have been fully explored before. I get LOTS of Google traffic, but it is not from these corny generalized phrases… it’s from the titles of the articles I publish every day. Once Google starts to see your website as legitimate, you start to get better rankings on your daily posts than you ever would have gotten out of specific terms.

Let’s check out some examples:
As I have mentioned before, I think that unless you are god of Internet Marketing, you shouldn’t be trying to use keywords to get traffic to your blog. Make your content unique and the search engine traffic will develop by itself. Here are a few terms that I have never promoted in any way, but are bringing me some great traffic on their own.

Most usually, these terms appear simply in the title of my blog posts. I have “All-In-One SEO Pack” installed in order to get this a bit different from the actual name of each post for just this purpose. I’ve had days where these terms rank #1, and days when they are just floating around the front page. At any rate, having quality posts like the ones I have shown you will get you the keyword-targeted traffic organically, without you having to go out and do the dirty work that doesn’t pay off. Don’t believe me? Try searching “free flip mino.”

The End Result on Keywords
One thing that I have come to realize with Google is that search engine traffic comes with time. As The Net Fool dot com has slowly become more and more of a force online, people are finding my blog at an alarmingly faster rate day after day. It really amazes me when I hear “I saw your site on X,” and serves as a huge motivation to keep going. You should never be trying to force yourself into the limelight by coming up with what you think is a winning phrase that nobody else knows about. It’s all been done, and Google simply will not give you any attention unless you have a reputable website save a few flukes in the system.

Bottom Line: Don’t bank on a Google fluke. Trying to market a blog with keywords is a waste of your time and money. You can see tremendous amounts of search engine referred traffic if you put out powerful, well-written and original content on your own. Build your empire by networking, not with hopeless dreams of keyword success.

-The Net Fool

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