Keyword Research and Targeting Advice: Use Real Language

I just got off the phone with a publicist who was asking about how to start finding blogs on certain topics and what keywords to search for. We started experimenting with different keyword combinations but none were really hitting what we wanted.
If you want to use valuable keywords in your posts, remember that you have to consider the reader (or searcher’s) perspective. Nobody searches for ‘healthy children’. If my kid’s healthy, I’m probably driving them to their next practice, not researching stuff online. People research problems and often use much different language than ‘experts’ do to describe the problem. They’ll use symptoms, they’ll use what they think might be the problem.
Start taking note of the emails you get, comments you receive and in forums you monitor for keywords that come up again and again. They may not be the ‘real’ phrasing of a problem – but they will be what folks are putting into a search engine.