Jamdo Marketing Blog

Most searches using a search engines do not use a single word. In fact using a single word to find what you are looking for on a search engine is a great way to be bogged down in a quagmire of irrelevant search results.

Ignat over at SEO Blog recently brought to my attention some statistics that reflect these facts. The vast majority of searches on the main search engines are carried out using two, three and four word phrases. Certainly that is a better way to narrow down a search and get some relevant results.

But what does it mean to us bloggers?

A few months ago, I started a blog on a newsy type of topic. It wasn’t a money making venture - more a labour of interest. It is starting to get some nice search engine traffic, but there is something that I have noticed by going through my statistics and logs (I use AW Stats and Performancing Metrics).

I get a lot of searches for people’s names.

In fact, the vast majority of the search engine traffic I get are from people looking for information on the people I am blogging about.

The great thing too, is that because my blog is a news type blog, I have a very good chance of getting to the top of search results for the names of people that I write about - largely because nobody else has written much about them or possibly hasn’t optimised their pages to show up in the search results for those names. That is because it is a breaking news blog - to an extent.

So how am I doing it?

When I find a blog-worthy story about a person, I optimise my post for their name. I will always use their name in the title, the first sentence and liberally throughtout my post. If there is some interesting online information about the person, then I make sure that I link to it, using their name as the anchor text, if possible. I also make sure that my internal linking strategy has links that point to my new post using the name of the person as anchor text. Basically solid blog SEO.

One other thing is that if the person’s full name has three names - like John Adam Smith, then it is easier to rank for the full name rather than just John Smith. This brings in more traffic as most sites will optimise for the shorter version.

Then I forget about it and move onto the next thing.

The great thing is that Google spiders my site daily, because there are always new stories. The indexing of a new story rarely takes more than 3 days and usually my site is in the top three for the name of the person I optimised for.

That’s a very easy way to get a lot of search engine traffic.

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