Anyone who's used Google will be familiar with the drop down suggested searches box. It's basically the search engine using its own data to do a bit of thinking for you and suggest the keyword searches that many other people have used.

So, as you type in each word, others magically appear below in the menu. The more words you type yourself, the more chance that you're using a completely one off, original search, and so the suggestions trail off to nothing.

This tool is extremely useful for webmasters and bloggers because they can be sure that if a keyword search appears, a reasonable number of people type that in every month. So, if you include such keyword combinations in your page and blog post titles and write lots of good unique content that's relevant to them you've got a good chance of ranking fairly highly for such searches, and ones like them. Targeted traffic will then follow.

That said, it's not always that simple, because some keyword searches have massive volumes and therefore huge competition. And that information is not included next to the words. Still, if you apply a bit of intuition it's not hard to find some keyword combinations with strong potential.

You can get pretty creative and find your own way of using this drop down suggestion tool. It's great for helping you get geo-targeted Aussie traffic too. One thing that people often do is type a country, state or city name, then their main keyword (or vice versa). Depending on how popular those keywords are, Google will then suggest many related, oft-used searches.

For example, if you run an employment themed website you can type in "Australia+jobs" and you'll get many suggestions. You can sift through them for ideas. And even some of the resultant three word searches listed will throw up still more that you can target.

Of course it's doesn't always follow that those typing in local location names are from Australia. However you can be confident that many of them are. Keep going with this technique - even if you don't do further research into exactly how many people type those particular searches and how many websites and blogs are competing for them - and you're sure to have some success before too long. Remember that a few such traffic trickles can add up to a flood over a year or so.

One thing worth remembering when blogging is that people are always on the lookout for specific information. That's why it's a good idea to write detailed posts with the names of products, companies, businesses and even well known individuals in the titles. It's usually pretty easy to end up on page one for search results for such keywords. And needless to say, if those keywords are specifically related to Australia, then you will draw local visitors.

And being opinionated can also make those posts stand out on the search results pages, making them more likely to be clicked on. I had a very good illustration of this recently.

Being a climate change skeptic I did some Googling on the issue and noticed that a theatrical management company that runs a lot of Perth theatre venues had some pretty full on green policies in place. So I wrote what was quite an abrasive, though humorous post about this on my arts blog. It ranked highly enough in Aussie searches including the company name that a journalist for a local paper who was researching a story on the company saw my post and read it. He thought that the blog itself was unusual and interesting, so ended up doing a story on it alone. It can be found on page 2 of the issue marked 14/5.

I haven't received any direct SEO benefit from this, since the issues seem not to be indexed by Google. However I've definitely had some clicks coming in from people who read the story, since I saw these in my stats. And it has certainly helped raise my profile as a local blogger.

So, remember to be specific with your blog posts, and don't be afraid to be controversial. It can definitely get you noticed by media outlets with a much wider reach.