"Your blog could become your car payment, mortgage payment, kid’s college fund, retirement fund, or even the key to your own beach house"

Even if you have a only a cursory knowledge of the travel space, chances are good that Lonely Planet is a brand name you recognize. If you take the time to read the article, you will see it has useful information. So where’s the problem? We need to discuss how someone discovers that the document exists.

If you are someone who enjoys reading travel blogs, you will come across this article and read it. If visiting Rio is on your bucket list, you might even bookmark it or send it to a friend. However, people who are searching for information on “how to plan a trip to Rio de Janeiro” or “how to save money on a trip to Rio de Janeiro” are unlikely to ever come across this article. Why? Because the author chose to go with a clever title instead of one with common language or keyword search volume. As humans, we can make the leap from ” shoestring” to “cheap” or “budget,” but the search algorithms can’t do it yet.

This is the point where bloggers moan and throw up their hands in disgust at the mere idea of being so pedestrian as to dumb down their artful language for the great unwashed masses, the common folk–or, worse yet, having to write for machine or search engine algorithm. If you are writing for yourself or for enjoyment, go ahead write about whatever you want and use what ever language and title you like. But if you want to make blogging an income source, yes, you will have to write using common language and for machines and search engines.

If you’re willing to swallow your pride, put your ego in check, and write using keywords that people are searching for, your blog could become your car payment, mortgage payment, kid’s college fund, retirement fund, or even the key to a bathrobe lifestyle at your very own beach house.

So let’s talk about how to go from your flowery, poetic prose to getting posts that rank, drive traffic, and make money. You need to understand that you can’t have flowery, creative language and be keyword focused. The two are mutually exclusive goals. You can, however, be interesting, useable, and have a keyword focused post if you’re willing to try. First, sit down and write the post you want. Get it to the point where you are happy with it. Bask in its artistic glow. Then reach for the battle axe and get ready to hack it apart. Hopefully your post has a key concept that people are looking for and you just obfuscated it from search engines with artsy prose. Here’s an example:

Your title:
My weekend visit to Sin City for less than 50 sheckels

Now compare it to these with greater keyword focus:
How to Plan a Weekend in Las Vegas for less than 50 dollars
How to Plan a Cheap Vacation to Las Vegas for under $50

If you think someone will go to Google and type in “visit sin city for less than 50 scheckles” or something equally obscure and witty, close the laptop and step away from the keyboard. However, if you agree that my suggested titles are much more likely to match terms users will actually type into a search engine, read on.

There are lots of tools to help you do keyword research like Google Adwords Tool, Wordstream, Wordtracker, SEMRush, and many others. Some are free, some are paid. Unless you happen to use a really crappy free one with data from Lycos and Hotbot, it’s pretty hard to completely screw this step up. Will the paid tools give you better data? Probably, but we need to start somewhere, and the goal of this post is to get you thinking about choosing keywords as a first step, not fine tuning for maximum value.

Once you have the keyword(s) concept, go back and start hacking up your original post, editing it for emphasis without making it sound too awkward. Striving for keyword focus is a bit art and science. Sometimes you give up a little focus for text that reads better and makes more sense.