I am extremely new to all of this, but relating to your choice of “off prime” keywords, here’s how I think on secondary or “less than hot” keywords – here is how I define “niche.”

I do a google search for a keyword, then do a wordtracker or similar search for that keyword. I then divide: google pages returned/wordtracker results of searches for that keyword, to come up with a ratio. I’ll then do the same thing for another keyword. In your instance, from latest google, “funnyvids” returned a ratio of .8275:1 and “funny vids” had a ratio of roughly 100:1. In other words, “funnyvids” had less than 1 site on the web for every search of that item, while funny vids had more than 100 sites for every search. An easy choice – funny vids.

This may be old news to everyone else, but as I have all of about 7 weeks experience in webmastering, it was a good discovery for me.

Nice site again, Jamsi. Thanks and good luck.

I may do an article on Wordpress setup for “power blogging” some time soon.

I’ve doctored it a little, including an else clause to show a default description, and also “php” on the opening of the php statements – don’t know if that’s necessary but that’s the convention i use.

Also, you should write that up as a post on your site – I know I’d post an article linking to it on my blogging blog (i.e. the one linked in my name).

The easy place to start is with your posting titles. If you put your keywords in your titles and then configure your blogging template to put your title as the permalink (puts the keywords in the URL), as the page title and the title itself on the page inside H1 tags, you’ll be amazed how quickly Google puts stock into those words.

A couple of weeks ago, I made an offhand fanboy posting about the movie Serenity and where you could buy “serenity merchandise”. Those 2 words were in my title. Within 2 days, my site was the number 1 entry in Google for “serenity merchandise”. I wasn’t even targetting the keyword, but Google clearly favored my entry over some other pretty authoratative sites, including the official site, the official fanclub, the forums that have been running for a couple of years now, etc.

Also, while Google doesn’t necessarily do much with the keywords portion of the meta tags, they DO use the description meta tag as the source for the little summary that’s shown on the search results. I discovered that recently myself when I noticed that all of my results in Google had the same summary: the one in my description tag in my template.

I’ve since swapped out the static description for one that is driven by the article excerpt instead.

Yes indeed, traffic was not earthshattering, but the net result was i still geeting MORE traffic by being higher up on the less searched for term than I could hope to get by trying for the most common terms.

Anyone know of a keyword traffic estimator that gives mispelling data?

When you talk “keywords” I assume you mean key words that you use in article to draw google hits because i thought Google didn’t rate the traditional meta keywords highly. Is this correct?

thanks

Congrats