New and Improved blogs
OK, so I came into Wealthy Affiliate to learn from the best and create a wonderful business and website from the vast and detailed training available here.
I have to admit that sometimes even as an adult you think you know more than you really do. Sometimes you think you've got it all together and others don't know what is going on. Sometimes you think you can improve on something before you even understand it completely.
So here I sit before you all, guilty of all the above. My husband would attest to that fact to, but has reserved himself because I don't often keep my mind open to see the points others are trying to make. OK lesson learned.
At some point last week I came to realize that I may not have understood the fundamental nature of keyword researching. I really thought I knew and went on about the business of building my pages. However, as we all know, sometimes things don't sink in or don't fall into place until we notice something is out of whack.
I have certainly been meticulous in my content writing, often writing rather lengthy articles for the sake of quality. Not to mention I often spend 10-12 hours a day on WA. Those hours weren't just hanging out in the chat rooms, or wallowing on the social websites trying to gain favor, they were real work hours, but still I wasn't getting any outside traffic to my website.
I have been with WA for 3 months now, I should have at least a little to show for my hard work given how much I have ignored my family and sometimes worked through until the morning light. Still I didn't even brush close to my expectations.
So Thursday last week I began combing my thoughts for reasons for not having not succeeded; reassessing my work, my time, my understanding of things. Rethinking how all the training was being pulled together.
Now, I don't know what made me think of it, maybe it was one of the questions that I asked in chat last week. Suddenly that little light in my head went BING; check your keywords. Apparently, I misunderstood how the keyword research and implementation was supposed to work. I have gone to each page, scrolled down to the find the keywords I used, and one by one plugged them into the keyword tool and looked at the details.
"What was I thinking?", was the question I found myself asking for almost every keyword. At this point, I couldn't even tell you, all I know is that I began undertaking a huge task this weekend. I had to re-research keywords, and I use 2 keywords or long tailed keywords on each page, and rewrite content to fit them for each of my pages (that's 19 pages to date).
Obviously, now I have to go back and check out the corresponding keywords in my 40 posts.
So I guess what I am trying to convey here is that although we may failed miserably sometimes, we can react in one of two ways. We can either accept defeat and fold up our cards or we can buck up and take the hard road.
I know many of you have already done this; changing themes and layouts, rewriting content, redesigning your original plans or rethinking your original thoughts about your website as you learn more and have not only taken the hit and recovered but are still here today pushing onward. I say kudos to you.
For those of you who have not had to do this, you should give yourself a pat on the back for having made good choices.
And for those of you who are new to all of this, don't let the "start over" button bring you down. It's not the failing that ruins us, but how we handle those failures that hold us back.
Best of Luck to you all, and even more success.
~Debra
Recent Comments
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I have had a similar experience. Another thing I have come to realize is that I am not the only one using a keyword tool so anyone that has a similar niche as mine, and is using a keyword tool may also be coming up with keywords that I decided to use because of low competition. This is a competitive field of marketing and because of that, I have found that a keyword search that revealed a decent traffic low comp keyword can change fairly quickly. I tested this theory and found that when I targeted some of these keywords in my niche, and then went back and checked them again several hours later, the competition had almost doubled. My point I guess, is that there are many SEO concepts within the WA programto improve rankings, and we won't learn to utilize them all overnight. This is an evolving process that needs to be built up from the foundation we are establishing from lesson one and moving forward. A page or post does not have to be set in stone. As we learn, we can utilize the edit button to improve on our content and increase our chances and rankings as we move forward. That's why this is not an overnight get rich scheme, which in reality makes it a more plausible and credible opportunity to me.
Yes, I did come to find that some of my posts were easier to change the keywords in s opposed to others which almost needed a total rewrite. So that is a very good thing to keep in mind.
In addition, I have also researched a keyword and had it jump high in points with hours when I mistakenly search the same keyword again.
I'm sure this is something that can also be done in Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools, so for some new people this could create a problem when many people are in the same niche. With that said, it might not be a bad idea to periodically go through some of your posts/pages to check on those keywords.
~D
Yes, good idea. I was wondering if after your content becomes a little stale with the keywords you have used, if would be a good idea to re title it with new keywords on the same subject and then again interject that keyword within the post or page again to get a little more mileage out of the content you already published.
Pretty sure that would be considered duplicate content by google. Not good.
I think it would be better to write a new post and use an internal link from that page to the old one that you want fresh viewers to go to so that it looks active again.
Our education, work ethic and successes (or lack thereof) are paralleled. I use Jaaxy to find keywords for myself and others and have written a synopsis on how to use them according to WA. I always use LT keywords and put them in the Title, and two or three times throughout a 500 word Blog. I never use more than one keyword an article although I have never figured out why you can't use two or three if you use them intelligently. I use SEO Yoast instead of WP SEO for setting my article up which I love but it is always telling me I am not using my keywords enough times throughout the article (which, to date, I have been ignoring). Everything else comes up green.
I am attaching what I sent to others who order LT keywords from me so let me know what you think. Stay tuned. By the way, how the hell did you get ranked so high in WA already?
I work really hard, Post every other day or so, answer a lot of questions when I can, post a heck of a lot of comments when I request feedback or comments, and welcome new members. I don't get through much traing fast as I try to be sure I am able to figure how everything goes together.
Congratulations for discovering the problem, and Kudos for acting on that discovery!
For what it's worth, I only research and use a single keyword for each page or post. I rely on Google to discover other related keywords. Jay (magistudios) refers to those other keywords as LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Index, I think). On March 16, 2015, he did a Live Video Class on it called LIVE! Low Hanging Fruit Case Study You can follow how well your keywords are doing by going to Google and putting the keyword in double quotes in the search field "like this", to find out if your keyword is getting any traction.
Best of luck with it!
Dennis
I am feeling very much like you are. I am not sure if I am being impatient or if maybe I have misunderstood this whole keyword thing. I am not really getting any "real" traffic to my site. It has been live for 8 weeks which I know isn't very long.
I have a question for you. When you rewrite content including keywords, are you changing the URL's of your posts/pages? I thought that doing this really messes things up with google.
Hi Tanja,
No I am leaving the URL untouched. DON"T CHANGE THE URL, unless you have just published (within a few minutes) or it's still a draft. I just changed the first paragraph, but on some I had to revamp the entire page pf content to make it fit the better keyword.
OK. That makes sense. I know we aren't supposed to change the URL, so I was wondering what exactly you were doing to revamp all of your posts.
Hey Debra,
I'm so proud of you. Too often people would just say WA doesn't work or this doesn't work for me so I'm going to give up. But not you! You re-evaluated what you were doing and made a change that I know will pay off if you continue to be patient and apply what you did.
Great job! Everyone should learn from this!
I have found same problem with my choices of keywords. I think I must have thought, paste and they will come. As I look back, I think my choices were based on what I thought and not on what the customer would want.
You're doing well Debra. Your blog is well thought out. I'm no expert, but I WANT to continue reading, which means it's relevant. Bless you....
Shirley
Hi Shirley,
That is a good sign. Thank you for taking the time to comment here :-), makes me feel better about it all.
~D
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I call it Failing Forward. You just found out 1 way that doesn't work for you. Congratulations! I have been there and I also had a light-bulb moment this week about keywords. For me, I had to prove to myself that I could actually write something that could be posted. My next step is to now improve the quality of what I post. This is a learning experience and I'm glad we have a community that helps us learn from our mistakes and encourages us to move forward.
Absolutey, and not only do we learn from our mistakes, we learn from others when they share it. What a great community we have!
~D