Yesterday we talked about traffic and how you can get more visitors from sites who are already sending new readers to you. Today we’ll focus on how to use keywords to increase both your rankings and thus your traffic to your site.

In particular we are going to optimize for those keywords that you are already getting traffic for. To find out what your site is ranking for, log into your Google Analytics account, click on “Traffic Sources” and then “Keywords”. You’ll find a list of keywords your site is ranking for and how much traffic each of them is bringing you.

If you don’t yet have Google Analytics installed or aren’t familiar with it, here’s a short repot you can download that will give you a good overview. Google Analytics Made Easy (PDF)

When I pull up a keyword report in Analytics for this site for example, some of the keywords that pop up are:

• how to use aweber
• how do I ping my blog
• affiliate marketing blog
• how to find affiliate programs on my niche
• adwords keywords review
• aweber blog broadcast
• how to create link redirects in emails
• how to use aweber on wordpress
• affiliate marketing goals
• best niche markets
• bleeding link juice
• clickbank commission theft

Once you have your list, it’s time to do some sorting. I like to separate them into two categories. Keywords that match and are optimized for existing content and keywords I can create more content around. Let me give you some examples based on the list from above.

Keywords like “how to use aweber” and “how do I ping my blog” are phrases that I deliberately optimized blog posts for. I’m keeping an eye on those, check how well I’m ranking for the keywords and then work on building links to rise higher on page one of Google for them.

Other terms like “how to find affiliate programs on my niche”, “adwords keywords review” and “bleeding link juice” for example are terms I’m getting a little bit of traffic for each month, but they aren’t keywords I’m actively going after – YET. They are just terms I happen to be ranking for because I’m using them somewhere in my content already.

I keep a running list of these keywords and turn to it whenever I need new ideas for things to blog about. It would be pretty easy for me to write a post titled “Are You Bleeding Link Juice? Here’s How To Stop It” . In fact, I’m going to save it as a draft title right now and you can expect to see the post on this blog within the next few weeks.

By keeping an eye on the keywords you are already getting traffic from and either improving current rankings for the posts you’ve written around the phrase or by creating unique optimized content around them on a regular basis, you can easily increase your search engine traffic to your site or blog.

P.S. Here’s another post I wrote a while back about keyword research skills. It has quite a few additional tips for getting more traffic to your site through targeting the right kinds of keywords.

Before we move into reviews of the various free and paid keyword research tools I use, I thought we should talk about the difference between long tail and short tail keywords. The graphic on the left gives you a pretty good idea of how this works, but let’s look at an example as well.

In the weightloss and diet market that I am currently researching for a new Affiliate Niche Pack, obviously weightloss, diet and even terms like losing weight are short tail or main keywords. They are very hard to rank for and should only be used as your main site keyword – the one you optimize your home page for. In the weightloss market, I would even go so far as to say don’t go directly for the main term at all, but use a modifier instead like weightloss for women, weightloss for kids etc for your term.

The next batch of keywords will still be used quite frequently, but the competition to rank for those terms will be a little less. Those terms make great category keywords. Examples of these types of keywords in the weightloss market are:

• weightloss programs
• weightloss centers
• weightloss surgery
• weightloss pills

The last group of keywords are true long tail keywords. These are not searched very often each day, but the reason I like them is because they are very easy to rank for. I use them for my blog posts or articles on my own sites, but also for articles that I write and submit to article directories.

Here are some examples of long tail keywords:

• benefits of nuts in weightloss
• weightloss recipes for juicers
• quick weightloss cardio workouts
• weightloss after three months

Long tail keywords are usually 3 or more words long.

Last, but not least, let’s talk about when you should use what keyword. If you are mostly writing articles to submit to article directories and promote an affiliate product in the author resource box, stick to long tail keywords.

If you are building a site, pick your main keyword for your home page. Next, pick 4 or 5 medium tail keywords for your categories. After that’s done, spend the rest of your time at first adding more articles or blog posts using long tail keywords.

Once you have 30 or so articles up, put some time into link building as well as creating more content. I like to split my time 50/50 between those two tasks.

P.S. Wondering how to find all those keywords? I’ll go over the various keyword tools out there over the next couple of days, but by far my favorite is the Wordtracker Keyword Tool.