Every blogger wants to be on the first page of Google, who wouldn’t. There are rich pickings to be had in that position.

Getting there is not easy. It takes work but it can be done. I’ve done it for several keywords on my blogs. In fact I have the number one slot for some of my keywords on Google.

You have to really think deep. What is my blog about? Then compile a list of 3 key things that your blog is about, and focus on the words in your list. For example the list for my blog could be.

# Show people how to make money from the public domain. # Where to find public domain resources. # How to create a blog in a day.

In effect what my list is saying is that “The aim of my site is to show you how to make money using public domain resources”.

The 3 phrases above are all longtail keywords. This means they are keyword phrases rather than just keywords. I’m trying to anticipate what someone would enter into a search bar if they were looking for the type of content I have.

People on the whole are searching for information on how to do something, or trying to find out something. Take for example a search for Public Domain books. It will bring up millions of results that you’re going to have to sift through to find your book.

So instead most surfers in order to reduce the number of results would enter at least a couple of keywords relating to their search. They may for instance enter “How to make money with Public Domain books”.

If you type that keyword phrase into Google UK you will see my site at position 1, 2, or 3. It varies position for some reason, I’m not sure why. But it’s up there on the top of the results.

Internationally I tend to hover around page 2 or 3, not bad when you consider that my targeting was the UK.

So think about the content of your site and try to use as many longtail keywords as you can, without it actually spamming your content. Otherwise Google will penalise you for spamming.

I hope this post shows you how you can optimise your blog and start pulling in some free traffic by using longtail keywords.