Keywords and Google organic placement

I did an interesting analysis of the meta keywords and description used on kidpub.com and how they relate to marketing with Google search.

About half of the traffic on KidPub comes from Google, but until recently I really hadn't done much in the way of marketing; mainly I'd monitored search results for a set of keywords related to the site and simply tracked their position. Much of my interest was prompted by a Drupal module called Search Referers that produces reports on the search phrases that are used to bring traffic to the site. I started to notice that the keywords I'd used in my meta tags were not the ones that were being frequently searched on.

I have about ten keywords in use at the site. Since I'd used Google AdWords in the past, I had a few old ad campaigns sitting around, and I used AdWords' traffic estimator to see what kind of monthly traffic each keyword generated on Google search. For example, one of my keywords was 'poetry'. Using the keyword tool, I found that the word 'poetry' generates about 3.3M searches each month. Great!

BUT, when I checked 'poems', I saw that the word generates about 9M searches per month! Simply by changing my keyword from 'poetry' to 'poems' I can tap an extra 6M monthly searches.

And so on for the rest of my keywords. Nearly all of the keywords I'd originally implemented had synonyms with higher potential search traffic. 'Stories' generates 16M, 'Story' generates 25M. 'Kids books' 25K, 'childrens books' 1M.

Google does serve up search results using synonyms, and the keyword tool will give you some insight into what they are, but tweaking keywords in the meta tags and title tag of the site just makes a lot of sense.