I've been using some more keyword hunches related to topical news stories on my rant blog (Die Fluffy Wuffy Die!), and it's worked well. For example I wrote a mostly humorous post about the recent top rating episode of Packed to the Rafters, in which the much loved character Mel Rafter died.
I got in early with it, and ended up on page one for various specific searches including those for "Mel Rafter". I was also ranking for some simple terms including the name of the actress playing this character, Zoe Ventoura. I've now been elbowed out by a lot of news sites and blogs more specifically devoted to entertainment and my post has fallen down the list for these one name searches, so the traffic has pretty much dried up. (I'm not sure of how many hits I got but it must be around a hundred. Not a torrent by any means, but I suspect they're all new visitors, and I probably wouldn't have got any of them had I not been mindful of keyword selection.)
That said, I'm still on page one for those two names combined. (BTW, the reason I don't often link to these posts is because there's a chance that doing so might actually harm their rankings. Google takes note of interlinking between sites that are owned by the same person. They are not given as much weight as voluntary links from separate sites. So if you overdo it you can be penalized.)
The reason I've gone into such detail about this little episode is that it reveals some good lessons:
One, you've got to "strike when the iron is hot" and get in early with a topical blog post. Secondly, if you can make an educated guess about what people will be searching for and target those keywords you can punch above your weight for a while, and get some good targeted traffic. (And keyword tools are pretty much redundant here. They will give you data about what has been searched already. But here you're trying to predict what will be searched.) Thirdly, you can get a lot of geo-targeted traffic by writing about topical keywords that are related to your country - or state or city, for that matter. (Packed to the Rafters is an Aussie show, so probably all of those visitors I had were also Australian.)
Sometimes you hit, and sometimes you miss with your topical hunches, of course. But even a few hits over a few weeks could easily triple your blog traffic over that period.
In summary I should make it clear that I'm not endorsing that you only write such posts so that you can get traffic. That would be putting the cart before the horse, and make for a soulless blog full of short, unoriginal entries. You should only ever write what you would want to write anyway. Then you'll always have something interesting to say. But if you're mindful of the SEO aspects as I've described, you can get more traffic to those posts than if you weren't, that's all.
I got in early with it, and ended up on page one for various specific searches including those for "Mel Rafter". I was also ranking for some simple terms including the name of the actress playing this character, Zoe Ventoura. I've now been elbowed out by a lot of news sites and blogs more specifically devoted to entertainment and my post has fallen down the list for these one name searches, so the traffic has pretty much dried up. (I'm not sure of how many hits I got but it must be around a hundred. Not a torrent by any means, but I suspect they're all new visitors, and I probably wouldn't have got any of them had I not been mindful of keyword selection.)
That said, I'm still on page one for those two names combined. (BTW, the reason I don't often link to these posts is because there's a chance that doing so might actually harm their rankings. Google takes note of interlinking between sites that are owned by the same person. They are not given as much weight as voluntary links from separate sites. So if you overdo it you can be penalized.)
The reason I've gone into such detail about this little episode is that it reveals some good lessons:
One, you've got to "strike when the iron is hot" and get in early with a topical blog post. Secondly, if you can make an educated guess about what people will be searching for and target those keywords you can punch above your weight for a while, and get some good targeted traffic. (And keyword tools are pretty much redundant here. They will give you data about what has been searched already. But here you're trying to predict what will be searched.) Thirdly, you can get a lot of geo-targeted traffic by writing about topical keywords that are related to your country - or state or city, for that matter. (Packed to the Rafters is an Aussie show, so probably all of those visitors I had were also Australian.)
Sometimes you hit, and sometimes you miss with your topical hunches, of course. But even a few hits over a few weeks could easily triple your blog traffic over that period.
In summary I should make it clear that I'm not endorsing that you only write such posts so that you can get traffic. That would be putting the cart before the horse, and make for a soulless blog full of short, unoriginal entries. You should only ever write what you would want to write anyway. Then you'll always have something interesting to say. But if you're mindful of the SEO aspects as I've described, you can get more traffic to those posts than if you weren't, that's all.
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