SEO Tip: Obvious Terms are Often the Least Searched

Here's an SEO tip for you: If you are looking for reasons to post content on your blog, look in Twitter. People are always asking questions, and I'll bet you can answer one of them. For example: a Twitter person asked no one in particular: "What is a hashtag?" If you are in Twitter, you will know that you have seen the symble that looks like this: #, commonly known as the "pound sign." As a person who works with social media, and answer question like this often, I know two things:

1. This is a small question that many people want to know the answer to.
2. Twitter has a vocabulary unto itself. Before Twitter came into my life, I know the # sign to be referred to as the "pound sign". "Hashtag" was a fancy new Twitter term.

As and SEO person, I know that if many people are asking a question, then there are lots of searches to be had from the search engines for this very answer. However, I have identified my first response when thinking of that term - which is so commonly "hashtag" in Twitter - to be "pound sign" in my own brain. Guess what? There are many others like me, or the early me, before the term "hashtag" became normal in my vocabulary.

That means that I have two ways of gaining searches for this question. I can deduce that the people asking this question are Twitter newbies. Therefore, they may not know the official term of the tag. People will ask:
"What is the Twitter hashtag?"
and
"What is the pound sign in Twitter?"

Yes, they may even type those very questions into Google, and I want to position my blog to catch them. Therefore, I have to use both the "hashtag" term and the "pound sign" term in my blog post title, overall body copy, and in any text or image links. I experimented with this by writing a post that defines the hashtag or pound sign, and uses both the "hashtag" and "pound sign" in the title.

What has been the first search result to come in? A result for the "pound sign". Does this mean that more people are searching for "pound sign"? Not necessarily. But it does indicate that not very many other websites thought to target that term, so my blog will rise above the competition and get those searches, ripe for picking.