The success of your blog depends on the collective success of your posts. One of the main factors for success is the traffic received by blog. In order to be successful, you need hundreds of thousands of page views every month. This can be achieved by writing compelling posts on topics that are in high demand.

Writing blog posts is time consuming. If you want to get the most out of your posts, you need write posts that have the potential to drive traffic continuously. The success of your blog depends on the popularity of your posts.

A high percentage of your readers are likely to come from search engines such as Google. More than half of my traffic certainly comes from Google searches alone although other mediums such as Social bookmarking sites, Twiiter and Facebook also generate significant traffic.

If you are struggling with finding blog post topics, I have written a post earlier this week on ‘How to find Blog Post Topics’ that you will find useful. In this article however I am going to focus on Google Keyword Tool and show you how a single tool can help you write posts that have a high potential for becoming popular and improve your traffic manifold. Google’s keyword tool provides keyword ideas and traffic estimates. You are likely to have used this tool for researching keywords in general.

I am going to discuss a simple technique using this tool that can help you to optimise your blog posts for maximum traffic from search engines. I use this approach often to write popular blog posts.

This technique is based on a simple fact that internet users may search for your content using different search terms to the key phrases for which you have optimised your blog post. I will explain this technique with the help of a simple case study. The case study involves writing a new post on the topic ‘Starting a successful blog’.

The Old Approach:

When I first started blogging, I would simply write a post on the topic I was addressing without taking traffic into consideration. So in this case I would have written my post, proof-read it thoroughly, and add a compelling title before publishing it on my blog. Some examples of titles I would have potentially ended up using are ‘Starting your own Blog’, ‘How to start Blogging’ or ‘Top tips to start a successful Blog’. I think you will agree that all these titles are compelling enough and in line with statistics that show that ‘How to…’ or list articles like ‘Top tips…’ tend to do well.

The New Approach:

Now, let’s see how you can do this differently to ensure maximum reach and traffic. Google’s Keyword tool can be very effective for optimising your blog posts. Before you start writing your new post, do a simple search using the keyword tool. Enter your potential post titles in the keyword tool and do a simple search.

Analyse the traffic results. In our case, the results for our 3 potential post titles are given below. The average monthly searches are displayed in brackets next to the title.

Below the main results that have been included above for reference, the tool also displays an extensive list of suggestions along with their estimated monthly search volumes. In this case, a couple of hundred results were displayed but I have hand picked a few that I believe are excellent candidates for the title of the new blog post.

With the above search volumes, you can see why it may be better for the new post title to be ‘How to blog’ or even  ’How to start a blog’ as opposed to ‘Starting a successful blog’. Clearly, it is searched much morel than ‘Starting a successful blog’. This is just an example. Any title with one of high impact variations will suffice.

It is important to note that the time and effort that goes into writing the article remains the same. The ideas and opinions presented are also the same. Only the title and the actual phrase the content is optimised for changes. The content is now optimised for the phrase ‘create a blog’ as opposed to ‘starting a blog’. The chosen phrase should accordingly occur a few times in the content.

This can have a big impact on the results. As your post crawls up in ranking, there is a huge potential for quality targeted traffic to your website. This simple technique can increase your traffic manifold as more readers are likely to find your post when they are searching on Google or other search engines.

This article was written by K.Singh, London based Web Design & Internet Marketing Consultant with over 10 years of experience in E-Commerce, Web development, Joomla and Search engine Optmisation.