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I agree with Donnie regarding targeting local or long tail phrases when looking for keywords to optimize for.

For example, if your client is a plumber, you'll have a hard time optimizing his site for the keyword plumber which has a difficulty of 63% according to the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty tool.

Since your client is a plumber, though, you could include a local word like the city or town where your client is located and get better results. So seattle plumber has a difficulty score of 41%.

You can often add qualifiers to get commonly searched for long tail phrases for even better results. So best seattle plumber service has a difficulty score of 37% which you could probably get ranked for if you include it in your SEOmoz campaign and focus on it.

While it's not a complete waste of time to go for words that have higher scores than 20s or 30s, you'll probably get better results faster if you go for words with lower scores.

I hope that helps!

Along the lines of what Alan is saying, I think your site is a prime candidate to take advantage of many juicy long-tail keywords.

I understand that you'd like to drive traffic to your home page, but keep in mind that the more likely scenario is you'll draw traffic through your articles which are easier to optimize than a frequently changing home page. This is a good thing, though, because people who enjoy your articles will click the home banner and read other articles from your home page. I've become a fan of many blogs this way.

So how do you get more traffic to your site? Make sure you incorporate keywords into every article you write, especially in the titles. For instance, with the Michael Le Vell article, you can search for relevant keywords by simply using Google Autocomplete (see attached image).

This will show you what people are frequently searching for related to Michael Le Vell. In this case, it's good that you included the word "arrested" in your Michael Le Vell article title, but it would be better for SEO purposes if the phrase was together. An alternate title might be "Michael Le Vell Arrested: On Coronation Street AND In Real Life!" There are a lot of related Coronation Street keywords you could use that can be found through the Google Keyword Tool.

My advice: leverage the strength of your site to draw traffic to the entertaining articles and your readers will naturally go to your home page when they want to read more.

I hope that helps!

michael-le-vell.jpg

There are many reasons to host your own WordPress blog versus using WordPress.com, including:

• You control and own the content
• You have complete design and layout control
• You are creating content for your site versus the WordPress.com site

This is a helpful article with good reasons for hosting your own blog: 6 Reasons To Host Your Own Blog.

But you're on an SEO site, so I'll address the most important reason to host your own blog: SEO. 

Blogs, as you know, are powerful SEO tools, especially self-hosted WordPress blogs with SEO-friendly skins such as Thesis. I've helped many clients achieve top 10 and even #1 rankings for targeted keyword phrases simply through their keyword-optimized blog posts.

This is why it's important to have the blog on your domain: that way you're driving traffic to YOUR site (where it can be converted to leads or customers) versus the WordPress.com site where you'd be driving traffic to Wordpress.com and people would have to make an extra click just to get to your domain.

That is why I advise all my clients to use self-hosted blogs for best SEO lead generation results and encourage you to strongly consider doing so as well.

I hope that helps!

There are a lot of different things you can focus on to improve your SEO results, Randy, and this is my personal preference as far as order:

1. Keyword research - make sure you're optimizing for the right keywords that you can realistically rank well for
2. On-page optimization - make the code and content changes necessary to improve your SEO results
3. Off-page optimization - build those relationships and get those back-links that help the search engines see your site as an authority site

Use the SEOmoz Pro tools for each of those areas and I think you'll start seeing good results in your charts.

I hope that helps!

This is a nifty trick to get a quick boost of traffic but it requires a bit of research and some trial and error. The approach is spelled out in this article: How Google Trends Can Boost Your Blog Traffic.

It boils down to monitoring Google Hot Trends and writing your blog post based on trending topics. This will work especially well with blogs based on news or current events.

But your results won't be guaranteed because trending topics fade as quickly as they appear. It's sort of like surfing: the best surfers figure out where the wave is GOING TO BE. If you can figure out where the trend is GOING TO BE and write your blog posts accordingly, you stand a good chance of showing up in the Blogs section of a given Google Trend.

Here's another tip: Google Hot Trends has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to via Google Reader or even have emailed to you via tools like Feed My Inbox. That way you can stay on top of the latest trends and have an even better chance at getting that extra boost of traffic.

Please try this out and share your results!