Keywords and Traffic

Keywords are words that are relevant to the topic being discussed in a blog. If for example the topic is "Barack Obama", some of the keywords would be: White House, American President, African American, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, US Senate, Democrat. Can you think of other keywords for the topic "Barack Obama"? Keywords are basically any term that can closely be associated with your topic.

Why are keywords important? Because they drive traffic. Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. It is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit. Your guests will be your "customers"---the recipients of your "products" or "services". Just like a real business, the more customers you have, the higher the income potential is.

Referring to the previous example, if your blog is about Barack Obama, most probably Michelle Obama will be mentioned in some of your posts. When someone searches for Michelle Obama in Google, there is a chance that your blog gets into the search results. The more keywords you use in your posts, the more chances your blog gets into the search results.

Now that you have the above information, the next step would be to think of keywords for your topic. You could use some help from:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The Blogger's Goal: High PageRank

PageRank is a ranking software that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents based on the relevance of the webpage to the search keywords entered. The weight assigned by PageRank is from 0 to 10 depending on the webpage's relevance (0 = low relevance; 10 = high-relevance). The software analyzes both the number of incoming links and the authority on the subject matter of the referring webpages to generate a relative measurement within the set. The name PageRank is a trademark of Google.

Now, what does this mean to you? Remember the last time you searched for a particular keyword in google, what appeared on top of the list? What dictates which webpage to be listed first? It is PageRank: webpages with higher PageRanks appears on top of the webpages with lower weights. To illustrate the importance of PageRank, the following screenshot shows that Wikipedia's webpage appears on top of the list when searching for the keyword "page rank".
Opening Wikipedia's webpage related to "page rank", the toolbar shows that its PageRank (or Google's view of the importance of that page) is 7/10. If you would check the other webpages after Wikipedia on the list from the previous screenshot, they would have importance of 7 or below. If you cannot view the PageRanks of the pages you are viewing, you may want to download the Google toolbar.
Being first on the list of search results would be any bloggers wish. Why? Because if not always, it is usually the first search result that is being viewed by people searching for a particular keyword. It is thus a blogger's goal to have his blog/website to get as high PageRank as possible.

What is a BLOG?

If not the most interesting, blogging is one of the most interesting ways of earning on the internet. Why interesting? Because it is what people want to do --- to express their ideas, questions, etc. Why blogging is financially beneficial? Because you can do a lot of profitable things with it. But before we go to the earning part, let us first define what a blog is.

All over the world, there are millions or maybe billions of bloggers. But not all bloggers know what a blog is or why call this thing a blog. The term BLOG is actually a contraction of the term "Web Log" (now, you know). It is an online journal, a web site that is regularly updated with entries of commentary, events, or other material such as graphics or video for general public consumption. Yes, blogs are for the general public, everyone who knows the url of your site can have access to your blog entries. Blogs entries are posted to a single page in reverse-chronological order.

Special thanks to http://www.finalsense.com/ for the neat design of this blog.