You might want lots of traffic to on your blog and be working hard, but have you done the job correctly? Have you missed the one step that can be the difference between success and total failure?

If you are working on your blog to increase its traffic volumes, then researching the keywords to work on is the singularly most important step. Get it wrong, or don’t do it at all, and you could be without traffic totally!

And this is not just when you are building links. If you are hoping that search engine visitors will find your blog then you also need to do your research so that your posts can at least cover popular research and hopefully some of your categories and pages can be aimed at high performing keywords as well.

Why can it go wrong?
It is very easy to fall for the trick of thinking that people are searching for the terms you think that they are. I have had customers ask me to help them optimise their websites for search terms that I have then done research on, only to find that there is no search engine traffic.

If you spend a lot of time and effort preparing your blog and are working on the incorrect search keywords, then you are likely to see absolutely no change in the traffic levels. What do you do?

Researching the correct terms
The first thing to do with any blog is to think of a few basic search engine keywords and then use one of the traffic estimator tools to check that these terms do actually get visitors. These tools will not only confirm whether the terms are seeing any traffic, but they will also suggest longer search terms that include your keywords. And some of these will be easier to work on than the shorter terms.

Checking the strength of the competition
Next, with your candidates of possible keywords to use, you then have to try some of these searches for yourself and decide whether you think there is too much competition. This can be very difficult for the beginner and you might end up spending a lot of time on trial and error, but with patience you should get there.

An indicator of whether a lot of people are competing for the same keywords is whether the sites on the first page of Google look optimised for the terms. If they are, there will be the keywords in the header title and description and headings on the page. If these are absent, then the sites are getting to the top of the listings by accident. This means that with some work you should be able to see good results.

And that is basically it. Research your keywords, check them out and then work on them. With the proper keyword research you should see plenty of new traffic.