Another week and another one of Lorelle's Blogging Challenges. Since I'm still 2 weeks overdue from last time, I might as well get on it. Although, it's safe to say that this would be one of the most technical-sounding posts I've ever done and if it sounds like greek to all but SEO junkies, I apologise. It's fair enough to say I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing as well, but a challenge is a challenge, so let's see what comes off it.

The challenge happens to be on keywords and search engine optimization (SEO). Now, I have somewhat done this before with all the incoming searches for Footsteps in the Mirror but this is to actually find out what are the top keywords that can actually bring people to this blog regardless of popularity. So at this point in time, we begin with these keywords that I expect from my blog.

1. blog
2. blogging
3. wordpress
4. life
5. philosophy
6. love
7. personal
8. blogosphere
9. malaysia
10. live

Now comes the painstaking searches through Google and the WordPress admin to come up with how many instances the keywords actually appear throughout my blog.

1. blog (825 instances)
2. blogging (575 instances)
3. wordpress (821 instances)
4. life (769 instances)
5. philosophy (124 instances)
6. love (860 instances)
7. personal (562 instances)
8. blogosphere (236 instances)
9. malaysia (840 instances)
10. live (821 instances)

It took me a while to realize that despite the low numbers compared to Lorelle's "12,800 occasions of the use of the word" WordPress, it was because for the most part, my blog's not really focused on anything but my personal life followed by commentaries on things that cross my mind. That and the fact that at this moment, I only have a little more than 1100 posts on this blog and I've only started using keywords wisely up from a couple of months ago. It's hard to machinegun personal posts with keywords unless I actually want to make less sense to what I'm talking about than what I already do.

And it is expected that some keywords that I expect to define my own blog aren't the keywords that I actually use in the first place. It's no big deal there because like I said, I don't usually pepper my post with specific keywords, they just appear as time goes by. But the surprising thing here are the actual bulk top 10 keywords that I could find that appears most on my blog.

1. blogs (1120 instances)
2. work (903 instances)
3. love (860 instances)
4. malaysia (840 instances)
5. blog (825 instances)
6. theme (821 instances)
7. wordpress (821 instances)
8. live (821 instances)
9. design (819 instances)
10. penis (782 instances)

Yeah…I have no idea where is went awry but when I started my blog, I doubt that the word "penis" was going to be one of the top keywords for this blog. From the looks of it though, it seems that my blog is likened to being one of those blogs that talks about blogs all the time. Not exactly a bad thing, but…I supposed it can't be helped.

If the idea behind keywords is that we start to clean up and focus on what we're good at then I'm afraid for a blog like myself, that's pretty much out of the question. It does help that people find their way to my blog through keywords that I use over and over again, but for something as personal and as fluidic as life, I'm afraid that unless I split my thoughts up into different blogs, there is no way it's going to be any more specific than it already is.

There is one thing you readers can do to help however. There is no way I can think of so many things at once and there might be a few things I can't see on my blog that you can. So if you do frequent my blog and you've got the time. Try putting in keywords that you think my blog represents to you. If it's anywhere as high as the top 10 keywords for this blog, I'll bump it up the list.

In the mean time, why don't you try out this challenge yourself? You might be surprised of what you might find anyway.