Part 1 gave you an introduction on why implementing an seo strategy with an optimal keyword attack formula is important and how long term search engine rankings are crucial to the success of your online business venture.
This part will explain how to actually put together an optimal keyword attack formula for your blog. Remember that part one described the different ‘variables’ that are a part of the concept ? Here’s the process that I have thought up in order to integrated these into a usable formula ?

Here’s an overview of the steps of the process :

1. Describe your main idea or topic of your blog very clearly (online business plan or mission statement)
2. Explore the online market by using keyword research tools
   2.1. Starting keyword research - start with the main idea and check for related keywords
   2.2.Constructing your main idea title out of relevant primary keyword phrases
   2.3 Determining optimal relations between keywords
3. Set up your blog for the optimal keyword attack formula that you constructed
4. Writing smart content in order to facilitate your goals

Hopefully I’ve added enough explanation for things to become clear, so here goes.

Step #1 - describe the main idea or topic of your blog very clearly
In order to make the right choices of keywords later on in the procedure you need to have a clear picture of the blog that you are starting. The way that your topic is defined in the off line world, may not be exactly the same as it is defined in the online world. In the online world your topics and attention points are represented by keyword phrases.
These are the terms that users look for in search engines. Selecting the most relevant ones to your blog idea and topic(s) is an important part of the procedure you are about to go through.

While describing your blog’s main idea, it’s good to cover all activities that you’re planning on taking in order to make the project a success. If you have thought of a creative marketing or branding strategy, then you should describe it. The same goes for attack strategies towards competitors. The reason for this is because your marketing and branding strategies can be closely related to your seo strategy. As I explained in part 1, bad search engine visibility can result in ineffective marketing, while good search engine ranking helps you get the most out of it.

It’s in this phase that you should write down all your creative ideas about how you think you are going to reach your goals. If you want create a blog that sells products through affiliate programs, then you should think about how you are going to sell these products. Are you going to write reviews ? Are you going to attract targeted visitors through smart content writing, or are you going set up pay per click campaigns that send potential customers to your product review pages ?

The trick is to plan ahead , because if you take this plan with you into this process, you’ll make different decisions and the outcome of your optimal keyword attack formula will be accordingly ! Good preparation is half the work !

After describing the main idea or topic of the blog there should be very clear picture of many aspects of what you are going to do. You could call this an ‘online business’ plan. Or blog mission statement.

I believe that Darren Rowse of problogger has written a post on how to write a blog’s missions statement once. I can’t remember how detailed that article is, but I do know that a writing a clear mission statement can be a lot of work.
I’ve had to write some during my business communication courses and it can take a long time to write one if you want to do it right.

In order to implement a long term seo strategy you need to have have a good description of the what you are starting and how you are planning to do things. Not having a clear picture of what you want to do means that you won’t be able to make the right decisions in regard of any strategy, be it seo or in other areas such as marketing or branding. Neglecting to write a blog or business mission statement usually results in having re-adjust what you’re doing a lot more often and even could mean failure of your project.

Step #2 - Explore the online market carefully - making an overview of the online market by thorough keyword research
As always, I will be using the wonderful wordtracker keyword tool in this post. The reason for this is because I didn’t find a combination of free tools that would enable me to do what I want to do. There are many keyword research tools. Some of them are free and and some cost money to use. Wordtracker is a payed service. I use it of the ‘related keywords’ search function.
This function makes wordtracker visit 200 websites that are related to your entered search term and then pulls hundreds of keywords form those site’s keywords and description metatags. These are keywords that might actually be used by web pages in your idea’s market.

This is good to know, because most probably the pages where the keywords are pulled from in some way also deal with these topics. This means that topics are related to the main idea of your blog as well. If you didn’t have access to this handy function you’d have to go and check each blog or web page manually.

I don’t use free keyword research tools for this particular phase of keyword research and I don’t know if there are any that have the same functionality as wordtracker in this case. There are many free tools and some of them can be very valuable as well. We have the Google Keyword External tool for instance, which has a ’site related keywords function’. The results however are a combination of I believe page scanning and database retrieval. This means that the results are a mix up. It’s a good idea however to use both wordtracker and Google’s tool in order to compare results.

Back to the matter at hand though,

Step #2.1 - Starting your keyword research - start with the main idea and check for related keyword phrases
As said, your topics in the online world are represented by keyword phrases, so the first thing you need to do is construct your main idea out of relevant keyword phrases.

Start with the main idea of your blog. Lets just take an idea that is popular with many people, let’s say you are going to start a blog about making money online and related topics, then you should enter the term [MAKE MONEY ONLINE] in the keyword research tool.

This is a very generic term, but it’s good to start with the most generic term, because if you where to start with a specific phrase then maybe you could be missing out on more terms that you could write about.

The keyword research (in this case wordtracker) tool will give you a list of related keywords phrases for [MAKE MONEY ONLINE] that are pulled from the 200 other web pages relevant to the main idea that you entered. They could be for instance [AFFILIATE PROGRAM], [WORK AT HOME], [SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING], [ONLINE MARKETING] and many others.

Your lines of thought could be :
These keyword phrases are ‘related’ to the main idea that you’ve entered. People searching for information about how to ‘work at home’ are very likely to be interested in the subject of ‘making money online’. The might not know how to do this yet, but luckily you are going to tell them how to do this by using ‘affiliate programs’.

Step #2.2 - Constructing your main idea title out of relevant primary keyword phrases
Next thing to do is to grab a set of the related keywords you find and construct your main blog title with them. Some people think it’s right to select 2 and others say 4 keyword phrases. I would say select between 2 - 4 related keyword phrases and try to construct a good main blog title with them ;).

When you do this, make sure that you select phrases that have a decent search volume and are as relevant to the main blog idea as possible.

For example :
newmediatype is a blog about how to improve internet business results. This term [INTERNET BUSINESS] umbrellas many other topics that are important for web business, such as [ENTREPRENEUR]. [INTERNET MARKETING], [ONLINE ADVERTISING], [SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION], [WEB DEVELOPMENT] and many others. The one thing that all these have in common though is that they can be found in the related keyword list that wordtracker has given.

Out of these related topics I chose 2-4 phrases to construct my main blog title out and constructed a main blog title out. Even though I haven’t put ALL the topics in the title, the ones that I used topically umbrella all the others.

Back to our example now,

Never use 1 phrase like [MAKE MONEY ONLINE] as a main topic. That would be too general. As said above, I usually select 2 to 4 phrases that describe what I want to write about in general so that I can construct a main title that would umbrella as many other subtopics as possible.

In case of our example, the [MAKE MONEY ONLINE] related blog. I could for instance call the main topic of the blog [MAKE MONEY ONLINE WITH AFFILIATE PROGRAMS WHILE WORKING FROM HOME]. This title combines the competitive keywords phrases [MAKE MONEY ONLINE], [AFFILIATE PROGRAM] and [WORK FROM HOME]. These are called primary keyword phrases.

It’s best is to select them based on relevance and search volume. The rests of our blog topics should be under the ‘umbrella’ or ‘derived’ from these primary keywords.

While constructing a main title its important to construct a sentence that is also readable for people. Otherwise we could just spam the main idea title with the primary keywords in exactly the way we find them. This wouldn’t very attractive to the reader. It isn’t be advisable also because search engines are smart and might penalize you for doing this. The trick is always to find the middle way in things.

Step #2.3 - Digging deeper into related keywords - exploring the edges the market and building the topical internal network of your blog
Take the set of primary keyword phrases you selected in order to construct a main blog title with and repeat the same process that is described in step #2.1.

Since [AFFILIATE PROGRAM], [WORK FROM HOME], [SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING], [ONLINE MARKETING] are all related to [MAKE MONEY ONLINE] now we are repeating the process for these 3 primaries. You are going to enter each and every one of those primary phrases and search for related keyword phrases.

Now you’re checking ‘related keywords of related‘ keyword phrases !

It’s in these lists of related of related keyword phrases that you are going to find many phrases that can possibly represent the topics that you are going to write about on your blog. If so then it’s those that you are going to turn into categories that are going to hold your posts. However there are some of these keywords that you should surely want to turn into categories and there are some that you should consider turning into categories. The choice depends on how much you believe the keywords in question are related to each other and to the main blog title.

Using your common sense is essential when choosing to keep or drop the keywords that you are getting. Here’s a few examples of what you should ask yourself when thinking to keep or trash them.

• How does the keyword fit under the umbrella main topic (described by the set of primaries) and would it give me enough traffic if I’d invest time and work in it. If so then include it in your list.
• Does the keyword have little traffic, but is very relevant to the main umbrella topic and you really like the topic then include it. You might be able to dominate this niche and traffic volumes can change in the future.
• Does a keyword have very little traffic volume and is it not very relevant to the main topic then don’t include it.

Which keywords to keep and which to drop really depends on your own judgment. You need to decide if you are including keywords based on if you think you can handle the topic. Just take a look at the main title for newmediatype and the categories that are on the blog.

If I wouldn’t have had an ICT degree, combined with a business / marketing communications degree, and on top of that many freelance web development experience, then I would be digging my own grave by trying to write about all these web business related topics. Use your common sense and you’ll make the correct decision. This can be a hard thing when you’re excited about starting !

How many times should you dig ?
I go through process multiple times, depending on the keywords that show up. If I notice the related keywords are starting to go off-topic in regard of my main topic or when I feel that I don’t have sufficient knowledge off the topics showing up, then I stop. In a sense this is painting a picture of the online market, including all the niches that are connected to it. At the same time selections you make are in according to your own capabilities.

Looking at ‘related of related keywords’ can also give you other valuable information
To show you how important this phase is, while researching your online market you for instance find :

• Easier to rank for keywords that are related to your main idea.
• Other ideas that you didn’t think of before. Sometimes even ideas for a completely new blog.
• Insight into topical relation strength. Maybe some topics deserve more of your energy then others.
• Ideas for writing articles.
  
  

Important note - what about long tail keywords ?
You may have noticed that we haven’t talked about long tail keyword phrases yet. Long tail keywords are very specific keyword phrases that don’t have many searches and are very targeted. These phrases are ‘derived’ from primary and secondary phrases. For example a long tail phrase derived from [AFFILIATE PROGRAM], which has a search of 400 a month, could be [AFFILIATE PROGRAM WITH HIGHEST EPC]. This is very specific and not many people are looking for it, maybe the phrase has 7 searches a month. However, it’s far more easy to rank for this long tail term then it is form the term [AFFILIATE PROGRAM] because it’s far less competitive.

The time when to start looking at long tail phrases comes when you’ve set up your blog and have structured it correctly. That’s the time that you start writing articles. You might want to optimize an article for some long tail term and ‘manipulate’ the reader to a more competitive page. It all depends on how creative your ideas are and what you want to do.

What we’ve done so far
Now you have a number of lists with many related keyword phrases to you main topic. Some have higher search volumes then others and some are medium competitive. What you need to do now is find a way to determine which keywords are optimally related to each other and to the main topic. Remember the variables that we talked about in part 1 of this article ? We said that we’d like to create an internal topical network of optimally related keyword phrases.

This is what we are going to do now !

Step #2.3 - Determining optimal relations between keywords
As you are creating lists of related keywords that are relevant to what your blog is about, you will notice that some keyword phrases show up again and again. No matter if you are checking for related keywords of the primaries, or related of related keywords, the same ones seem to pop up in each list every now and then, no matter how deep you dig. The topics represented by these particular keyword phrases seem to be very well ’spread’ through the online market that we are researching.

For example :
If you’d take the time to study your related keyword lists and write down which phrases are occurring most times, then you’re identifying the topics that have most ‘reach’. This doesn’t mean that you should exclude all other relevant topics, but you might want to consider how important these ‘far reach’ phrases could be to your idea and how they can facilitate your ideas. I like to use a tool for this phase, because searching through lists is way too time consuming.

What I usually do is run the lists through a duplicate line finding tool. This way I can determine which keyword phrases are found in every list that I have created. So if I find the keyword phrase [SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING] as a related keyword to [MAKE MONEY ONLINE], and I check the related keywords for [AFFILIATE PROGRAM], [WORK AT HOME] and [SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING], and I find [SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING] those lists as well ; then you could speculate that [SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING] has more ‘reach‘ then topics that don’t show up in all lists.

Wouldn’t that mean that [SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING] would be a good topic to use in order to ‘interconnect’ the different levels of competitiveness which your blog’s blogs internal topical network is build up from ?

I surely would consider putting [SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING] as a topic on my blog if I were to know enough to write about it. If you don’t have any knowledge on the topics however, even though the topic has more reach then others, you’re only hurting your own efforts by writing about it and it’s better to leave it out.

What you CAN do however is select it into you formula and keep on the shelve until the time is right. You could for instance write content for the subject which is general and doesn’t need specific knowledge. This way you’re at least already building some rank for the this topic. Another example of how important smart writing is.

If you take a look at the category names on newmediatype, I’ve chosen them based on how related they are, how relevant they are to the main blog idea. Furthermore I’ve chosen them based on how much knowledge I have on the subjects. I’ve even included some topics in my seo strategy that I haven’t reached yet in regard to my knowledge.

These topics aren’t visible on the blog yet, but WERE a part of the selection process when I was going through it, because I know that in the future I will be targeting these topics. There might be some posts on newmediatype dealing with the subject already in a general way already. They are all part of the big master plan. Again, the importance of planning ahead becomes clear, because the topics I am referring to are very related to what’s already on the blog.

Phew, I need coffee, see you in part 3