Hi Jeannette, I don’t mean to poke fun, but we are currently ranking page 1, #1 for the keyword phrase “Copyright Information For Authors” as of 1pm March 14th.”

We’re page 1, #2 for “Web Seo Consultant”

Yes, both keyword phrases are not the most popular keyword phrases going. Nevertheless — and as you can see — good search rankings are achievable by us.

In the last few days, while spending late hours running keywords, the following occurred to me: if a keyword phrase involves a business blogging/social media topic that I can write on, and the phrase is associated with a reasonable number of searches in the last year, then why roll the dice in hopes that I’ll get some traffic for a business blogging post I came up with off the top of my head? Why not just write in response to a keyword and potentially help insure some degree of search exposure for the post?

I am sure this is something that has dawned on hundreds of thousands of other bloggers over the last decade as they’ve considered their blogs’ SEO and future posts while pouring over keyword results. And certainly seo blogs and dozens of books on blogging/social media have, over the same time period, probably recommended the aforementioned approach for bloggers.

However, vs. keywords I’ve researched in the past for other blogs, many of the Keywords related to TBB actually seem like the basis for good posts. Looking deeper for longer versions — long-tail derivatives of the root keyword — seemed to help in this regard.

Certainly the categories are another area to make work optimally for business bloggers reading.

Where I’m coming from with “let’s optimize our articles” is that we have, so far, going on 7 months worth of material — 228 posts published at present — that are not assets for us in search. Those 228 posts don’t effectively exist for search users.

“Let’s optimize our articles” is something I was really, especially thinking about for posts we’ve already written.

We could forget about the past 228 posts and just focus on using keywords to align future posts with the (presumptive) search habits of business bloggers. But, I’d personally love to see all those already-published 228 posts also working on our behalf in search.

However, if we can’t optimize the old posts seemlessly, then its not the end of the world; we can just leave them as is, go forward and make sure that at least the new posts are in accords with business bloggers’ search habits.

We also should look at our categories. Do the blog categories match what people are searching for? If they match, then more contributors will write articles that match what people are searching for.

We decide to use the longer 6k version thinking its relatively uncontested territory on Google, and we could end up finding out that there are already 3000 other sites with title tags and incoming links using that keyword’s text. Such competition would effectively squash the SEO potential of that keyword for us in the near term, and likely the long term as well

Now, of course, the good news is that, yes, it seems quite reasonable to assume that longer versions of keywords will tend to be contested less in search than their shorter, root versions. So, if you use longer, “long-tail” versions of keywords, you are probably going to tend to see more near-term traffic overall than from using short-tail keywords.

But as to whether the long-tail versions are necessarily uncontested, or contested to within a low enough range for SEO-use by a new site? That’s a different story.

We could use 100, site-related, long-tail keywords, decide to use them because they are obviously searched less than their root versions, think our SEO is solid, and proceed unaware that 75 of those long-tail keywords are used by every dog and his person out there (or at least by enough of them to be a problem for us) — this fact effectively rendering those 75 long-tail keywords of little SEO value to us near-term, and likely the long-term as well.

However, I am right there with you on the traffic-you-want angle. Long tail or short, I think all are smart to use keywords that only relate to the content of their blogs/sites. Presumably the people using said keywords, regardless of where they are in the world, will see your site listed, click and say: “this page is related to the keyword I searched on.” If yours is an information site, their clicks will presumably be traffic that you’ll want.

I certainly also agree that how business blogs are effectively used depends on the goals of the business person in question.