Political blog, how do you do keyword research?

Keyword research for a political blog is not as important as it is for a gardening site. Of course, you still want to do traditional keyword research so you can write important 'sticky' posts that have a chance of showing up in the SERPs, but for your day-to-day posts, you need another strategy.

Google gives you two tools you might find useful: 'google trends' and 'google alerts'.

Trends shows you what the hot topics are at any given time. Alerts sends you an email every time your chosen keyword is found in a newly indexed page (or perhaps only in pages of a certain level of importance).

So for instance, as I check google trends, I see that Linda McMahon is one of the current hot searches. She just won one of the Connecticut primaries for governor. If you had a political blog with a post optimized around her name, you might get some decent long-tail traffic. And if your blog had some authority, the same post would get you a ton of traffic.

So set up some google alerts, check trends regularly, and most importantly: know your target niche/market inside out. Remember that the google keyword tool is a half-year behind the times. The 'real' keywords that your target audience uses and searches for might not show up in keyword tools. You can't fake being an authority, so start studying.

Good luck!