How do I get a blog to help my SEO?

[vsa]

We are from a volunteer organisation called Voluntour South Africa, when we google the word voluntour, our site is on the first page, but when we google volunteer it is not even on page 20. Can I use a blog URL or title to help the SEO for people using the search term volunteer in SA? or do I use our existing URL http://www.voluntoursouthafrica.com?

[Samuel]

Actually, either of your website can be used. I know for sure you have certain keywords that you are using that links to your official website upon doing blogs.You still have to submit your website to the search engines directory. Don't wait for them to pick it up for you.

Another effective way is to do the social bookmarking. Submit your URLs to any social bookmarking sites. You can try use the social marker site. You can read more articles about how to optimize your website to my source below. I hope this will help you.

[Journey]

The reason why you rank top for the keyword "Voluntour" is that keyword is found on your domain name and it also has less competition.

For the keyword "volunteer", this keyword is too general and quite competitive...

You can use both your blog and main site to target the keyword "volunteer in SA" to help you rank in Google for that keyword..

[Inga]

The word "volunteer" is too competitive of a keyword for you to achieve high rankings for. I did some brief research on a tool called wordtracker (a good investment) to see how competitive your target keyword is.

Below are a few non-competitive keyword phrases people have been using that you might be able to adapt in an article and publish on your site or on ezinearticles to get a good page rank with a back link to your site. You can use these phrases as a lead in to helping people consider volunteering in South Africa.

"custom safari south africa" was not competitive at all and had 20 searches in the last 160 days.

"arranging holidays south africa" was another phrase that had 25 searches in the last 160 days.

26 people mispelled the term "majical journey south africa" in the last 160 days.

59 people searched for "what kind of animals live in south africa" -- that would be a nice topic for a short article that could offer the idea of seeing the animals through a tour -- but these are people that are not necessarily likely to want to travel to south africa.

"oprah's school in south africa" was searched 383 times without that many sites competing for those specific keywords.

Use your target keywords in the titles of your pages/articles and then sprinkle them within your page.

Unless you are regularly crawled by Google, it might be a while before Google picks up on the changes you've made to your site. I recommend publishing short articles with your target keywords in frequently crawled content sites like ezinearticles.com. That way, your article is seen by everyone on the search results a lot quicker, like less than a week maybe, as compared to 3 weeks. Then put a back link to your site at the end of your article. --- this type of seo is called "bum marketing" I think.

I do administrative and web support services for small businesses and ministries. I hope this helps.