Search Phrases and Keywords - A Traffic Building Exercise

Try any number of combinations of a phrase, and see how different the search results returned for each phrase can be. For example, open four individual browser tabs (or windows if necessary).

Google the following phrases:

• hammer tools
• hammers tool
• tool hammers
• tools hammer

When I Googled the four above phrases, I got different results, or the same results in a different order. Without scrolling down on each page, I can already see that MyToolStore came up within the top 5 listed results in all four searches. You can experiment with this using almost any phrase, in almost every search engine, and it will produce the same result - single or plural nouns, as well as the order of your chosen words will have a direct impact on the results returned.

Why should this matter to you? Well, you see . . . your will appear in the search engines much in the same way as the tools and hammers. The average search phrase is about 4 words, and that will also produce more specified results. For example: If you are searching for a hammer, you are likely to also type in what type of hammer you are looking for. If you just typed in hammer, you would get too many unrelated results - but if you typed in "geology hammer" or "rock hammer" your results would be much more specific.

Since your blog will appear in these results as well, or articles that you write, you'll want to use certain keywords and phrases in your writing - naturally, of course. You can easily implement this tactic by replacing words like "it" and "this" with keywords and key phrases that search engines will pick up on. For example: In this article, I have used the following words: blog, blogging, write, and writing – a combined total of nine times so far. (This will increase with the next sentence!) When I ran a search for the word “blog”, the search tool included the word “blogging”. But when I entered in the word “blogging”, it did not pick up on the instances of the word “blog”.

From this simple exercise, you can conclude that the root words are more likely to produce results that include other variations, as long as the spelling of the root word remains intact. For example: “Write” will not bring up results containing the word “writing” because the ‘e’ in vary was replaced with the letter ‘i’ in writing. The more you mention a certain subject in your blog posts or article writing, the easier it will be for search engines pick up on your keywords, and will eventually regard your website or blog as “relevant” to a certain topic.