In the long run, I use Google Analytics to track my site’s stats. But in the short term, I prefer Statcounter. Every day or two, I check in on my “Recent Keyword Activity” section to see what people have been looking for.

Most of the time, the searches are logical.

Sometimes, however, they’re actually useful for making your site more visible. Because sometimes people search for something that’s related to your site but that you haven’t actually covered.

And if your site ranks highly for this search, then it’s likely that if you write a real article based on those keywords you’ll rank highly for that as well. Apparently few other people do.

Simply use common sense by putting those keywords in the Title, in the post-slug, in the post, and perhaps in an h3 tag or at least bold. And write something useful, since part of ranking well is getting links to the post. Trying too hard—stuffing keywords and the like, probably won’t help on a number of levels.

Example of SEO Ranking for Keywords

Back in February, someone found my personal finance blog by searching for how to hide money from an abusive husband. She was sent to a post which wasn’t really related at all.

I didn’t know much about SEO at that point, I just thought it was a real pity that she couldn’t find something more useful. So I consulted my readers and wrote a series of posts. There was a lot of good discussion.

Now, I get a lot of traffic on that post. I rather wish I didn’t, because it seems to be mostly people who are being abused or people who want to hide money from spouses—which I believe is unethical if the marriage isn’t abusive. But I’m also hopeful that people coming to my site will find something useful.

And I’ve learned a valuable SEO lesson.

So the next time someone gets to your site using a crazy search term, go ahead and laugh. Just keep an eye on the search terms. Sometimes they’re a way to discover keywords and phrases which you can turn into even more relevant articles and which will rank even higher in searches.

Note: this fix will work for both Cutline 3-Column Split and Cutline 3-Column Right Wordpress themes.

I’ve had several people contact me to ask how I changed my personal blog’s header from the Cutline 3-Column version (click on any image to see a larger version):

To this:

How did I get rid of the extra picture, freeing up more space for text above the fold? The simple way to do it is by removing all this code in the header.php file:

<div id="header_img">
<?php if (is_home()) {?>
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'; ?>/images/header_1.jpg" width="970" height="140" alt="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> header image 1" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> header image 1" />
<?php } elseif (is_single()) {?>
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'; ?>/images/header_2.jpg" width="970" height="140" alt="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> header image 2" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> header image 2" />
<?php } elseif (is_page()) {?>
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'; ?>/images/header_3.jpg" width="970" height="140" alt="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> header image 3" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> header image 3" />
<?php } elseif (is_archive()) {?>
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'; ?>/images/header_4.jpg" width="970" height="140" alt="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> header image 4" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> header image 4" />
<?php } else {?>
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'; ?>/images/header_5.jpg" width="970" height="140" alt="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> header image 5" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> header image 5" />
<?php } ?>

</div>

However, this leaves you with a thick black bar (at the bottom of the #nav section…you can barely see it in the original Cutline image since it almost blends in with the picture) directly above your blog. It meshes rather unpleasantly with the top of the sidebar widgets.

To fix that, go into the ul#nav section of the theme’s stylesheet (style.css) and add the following code:

margin: 0 0 10px 0;

This creates a 10px margin between the line and the top of the blog/sidbar, a small visual break.

If that’s not enough for you or you don’t like the overall thickness, here’s the code to lighten all the lines as I’ve done in the picture below. I changed their colors to match the horizontal line at the top of the blog (whose color is defined as #ccc in the #masthead h1 section of the stylesheet, if you want to change that as well).

This code will lighten the lines above and below the navigation links:

ul#nav { list-style: none; width: 950px; padding: 0 10px; margin: 0 0 10px 0; border-top: 1px solid #ccc; border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc; float: left; clear: both; }

and this code will change the sidebars to have lighter lines around their widget headers as well:

li.widget h2, li.linkcat h2 { font-weight: bold; font-size: 1.077em; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0 0 0.8em 0; padding: 0.4em 2px; border-top: 1px solid #ccc; border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc; }

This is what the end result will look like:

Voila! Let me know how it works for you.

Related posts:

• Introducing the Silver Light 3-Column Wordpress Theme
• Tutorial: Adding Gravatars to Cutline Themes
• How to Change the Name of Your Wordpress Theme