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Turning Blogs into Longtail Honeypots

If you already have a blog you probably have noticed the attractive keywords searches that naturally stream in. This is the wonder of mildly focused, frequently posted, haphazard content and Google’s love affair with blogs.

The breadth and frequency of blog posts often open the filters and let us see search results obscured from our increasingly traffic engineered websites. This precisely the trickiness of creating an efficient process to draw in longtail keywords and not ruin the effectiveness of the technique.

Use Categories to Funnel Organic Traffic

The best way to get the right blend is to create a broad funnel. Start with a conscious topic area–a broad keyword. Then, much like you would with a domain, develop a good solid base of categories. However, maintain your normal non-SEO, informal blog-style content generation.

Some attempt to automate this process and get a little “blackhat” using a scrapper to seed keyword content into a splog.

Why I Don’t Advocate Scrapping

I tend to argue against this approach for a couple of practical reasons. Here are my reasons for maintaining my manual posting to these blogs:

• Monetize your affiliate program content research with Adsense by blogging what you learn
• Blogs can be great knowledge bases just waiting to be searched for future ideas
• Buy a domain for each blog and make them domain aging outposts for future projects

Collecting the Longtail Keywords

Don’t forget to actually capture all this data. Blog stats packages are great for quick temperature checks on blogs, but put Google Analytics in place so you can do some serious keyword databasing.

Don’t leave the data idle–flip new longtails into your keyword research queue. The good ones should be flushed out into a PPC or Article Marketing campaign.

Expanding the Keyword Capture

Always be looking new keyword opportunities. As new search phrases come in see if there are opportunities to expand your categories or your posts to bring in more keywords.

Also, don’t forget to check your link backs and trackbacks. Yes, they will happen even on a keyword honeypot. These are great opportunities to find other concepts and categories you should be capturing.

Turning it Into Profit

Well, that is simple. Kick it into you normal keyword analysis or marketing program. Here are a few ideas:

• Adsense on the blog itself
• eBooks built on longtail clusters of interest
• PPC campaigns
• Article marketing topic