While most of my clients provide me with keywords and keyword phrases, I’m occasionally asked to do my own keyword research before writing the article. Where to start? Google’s Keyword Tool and WordTracker.com are two good tools though I’m sure that there are others. Google’s Keyword Tool is free while you must subscribe to WordTracker in order to use it.

These tools show you what people are actually entering in the search box. Remember yesterday’s blog post where I talked about those awkward keyword phrases? Think about it, when you enter a search, you’re not entering complete, grammatically correct sentences, right? I used the example, “freelance writer needs work that pays” as an awkward phrase. This is what’s known as a “long tail” keyword phrase because it consists of more than three words. It is also extremely specific.

I found this keyword in WordTracker and found that it had an average of 22 searches per day and a small amount of competitors. While 22 searches per day doesn’t seem like much, I liked the phrase and wanted to experiment with it a bit, both as an example of an awkward phrase as well as to see how incorporating it in my Web site might result in increased traffic from writers needing help getting started with freelancing.

Guess what? As of right now, less than 24 hours after posting the post with that keyword phrase, my Web site comes up in the #13 spot for “freelance writer needs work that pays” – out of 203,000 results. If a searcher puts quotes around the phrase, guess what spot my site appears in? The top spot! Number one on Google!

The moral of the story? Whether you need to find keywords for a client or for your own site, tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool, WordTracker, and others help you make informed decisions.

I talk about keywords and research in greater detail in my Secrets to Success on Constant-Content.com eBook.

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As I mentioned the other day, I’m trying a little article marketing. Here’s a link to an article I put out on ArticlesBase about using awkward keyword phrases:

Using Awkward Keyword Phrases and Looking Good While Doing It

This technique is relatively easy to do once you get used to the idea of breaking up the phrase with punctuation or paragraph breaks. In addition, take advantage of sub-headings. 

Another little trick is to quote the phrase somehow. For example, the other day I stumbled on the longtail keyword phrase “freelance writer needs work that pays.” Now, that’s a bit awkward, wouldn’t you say? After all, I’d be tempted to add the word “who” to the phrase but some clients don’t want you to do that. Instead, I wrote a sentence along the lines of, “Instead of taking out a CraigsList ad that says, ‘freelance writer needs work that pays’ . . .” 

Notice what I just did? I just squeezed in that awkward keyword phrase twice. Now my website/blog has three instances of “freelance writer needs work that pays” – make that four – without having altered the phrase or looking overly awkward myself. Using the technique described in my article, I can also do this:

Are you a freelance writer? Need work that pays?

I fudged it a little, but that’s okay.

Take a look at the article for more details and let me know how you used these techniques to work in awkward phrases. The article is free to distribute, too. And if you are a freelance writer who needs work that pays, join me over at Constant-Content.com.

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Last night I posted an article, Punctuation: What it Does and Why it Matters, on several article directories. While article marketing is an excellent link building strategy, I haven’t ventured into those waters before. The article has already been picked up by other publishers and links are pointing to my Web site, so that’s encouraging. It feels strange to let an article go for free though.

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This week is going to be busy! I have a bunch of college program descriptions, technical training articles, and article marketing articles to write as well a newsletter, keyword research project, and a case study. If you don’t hear from me in the next few days, those are a few of the projects that I’ll be working on this week. Of course, these are all in various stages of development. For example, the newsletter is nearly done and I’ll be outlining the case study – not necessarily writing the entire study this week.

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