I would like to preface this tutorial by stating you should never “blog for the search engines.” In other words, always remember your true audience while engaging in acts of search engine optimization.

Now with that said, it only makes sense to increase the visibility of your business blog. Previously, we talked about the 5 P’s of starting a business blog. One of the P’s was purpose. And no matter how you define your blogging purpose, there is one necessary ingredient you’ll need for success — blog traffic.

Search engine visibility is one of many ways to increase traffic to your business blog, so it will be the topic of this discussion.

Key Phrase Research

Before you can improve your blog’s search engine visibility, you have to identify the key phrases under which your blog should be found. As we have defined, key search phrases are those phrases your target audience would enter into a search engine when researching services like yours.

For instance, if you’re a pool builder in Austin, Texas, your key phrases might include:

• austin pool builders
• pool companies in austin
• austin texas pool builders
• build a pool in austin texas
• and so on…

Key phrases are critical to your search engine success. The only way to connect with your key prospects through search engines is to know what phrases your key prospects are searching.

The trouble is, a lot of people waste time, effort and opportunity by incorporating the wrong phrases. This limits the number of people who find your business blog, and it prevents you from tapping into the best audience of all — people searching for exactly you what provide!

Don’t Guess at Your Key Phrases

Here’s the good news. You don’t have to guess which phrases people are searching and which ones they’re not. You can find out by using a search tracking service such as WordTracker.com or KeywordDiscovery.com. With either of these services, you can enter a particular search phrase, and they will tell you how many people searched for that phrase in the past month.

Both of the services mentioned above are paid services. But WordTracker does have a free version of their service that should be more than sufficient for your purposes:
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Keyword vs. Key Phrase
Don’t be misled by the term “keyword.” It’s rarely a good idea to focus on a single word when optimizing your website. That’s why I use the term “key phrase.” Few people enter a single word into a search engine these days. Most people enter two, three and four-word combinations (or more).

How Many Phrases?
How many key phrases do you need to focus on? Well, that depends on the key phrase research you do, what services you offer, etc. In my experience, most companies can limit their SEO efforts to 12 - 20 key phrases (or even fewer). You can probably guess most of these phrases off the top of your head, and that’s fine for starters. Just be sure to validate them through one of the services mentioned above.

Think of your key phrases as the seeds from which your business blog content will grow. When you find a phrase related to your business that a lot of people are searching, you need to plant that seed and grow content. Quality, keyword-rich content is the basic starting point for search engine optimization (which is the starting point for business blog visibility).

Just remember the disclaimer with which I began this article. In your attempts to increase your blog visibility you must never forget your real audience. Search engines will never buy your products or sign up for your services … some people tend to forget that.