Part II of our discussion on SEO for blogs focuses on the phrases and keywords you should use to attract the most visitors to your site.

Recent research suggests that the highest conversion rates from search engine traffic actually comes from people who use a specific number of words in their search queries. The first question is: Do you know how many words you should be using? And the second more important question is, If you don’t know the answer to this question, how are optimizing your site for SEO?

The great thing is that your blog can become so well-indexed with the proper promotion that you have potential to show up for a large number of these phrases relevant to your industry with that knowledge.

Targeting your blog discussion to shorter phases is another strategy to potentially yield high traffic to your website and blog, once again by choosing appropriate keywords that may have less competition than others, and even less so since they aren’t what some consider the “optimal” length.

And think of it this way: Would you rather be the 20th result for a very competitive query, with loads of competition vying to win it, or be the 2nd or 3rd result for a relevant, but less common phrase or query?

Which do you think could generate more visits, and thus more attention, awareness and revenue for your company?

Also, some believe that since Google and other engines have been around for so long, and recognized the “big” players in most keyword and query categories, that competition is far too intense for any of the “good” keywords or phrases.

In one sense this is true for most general keywords and phrases, or the specific ones that are absolutely the most profitable – the ones that major corporations and other large institutions are willing to spend big money to “win” – or terms which many other larger organizations may simply be more relevant in regards to. They have spent large amounts of resources for lengthy periods of time with the engines to ensure they rank very highly for their target keywords and search phrases.

But many of the “most popular” queries currently conducted in search engines right now have come into existence in just the last couple of years…and of course as technology (and everything else!) continually advance, there will always be opportunities to “win” newer, profitable queries – if you know how to discover them. (This is one of the subjects that we focus on here at Hat Trick Associates.)

You can also set up your blog to repeat the keywords that you want to target just enough times to establish a theme that search engines can identify. You can take full advantage of this in your post titles, your category names, the pages URL names, or even a combination of Technorati tags and the text of your permanent links that appear after each post.

Up Next: The Importance of Timely Posting and Getting Linked with Your Blog