Weird, odd and downright bizarre SEO keywords that drive my traffic: SEO gone wrong

SEO keyword research can yield some odd and unexpected results. Google webmaster tools, a free service designed at helping webmasters optimize the visibility of their websites, can be an incredibly useful tool for keeping track of which keywords your blog or site ranks highly on in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Internet marketers need to regularly check their analytics services to ensure that the right organic search traffic is arriving from the major search engines. The "right" traffic is any traffic that comes from a search that is highly relevant to the subject matter of your site, products and services.

That's the theory that marketers and SEO gurus will tell you. It doesn't always work out though. Here's a list of the strangest SEO keywords and phrases that I have discovered on my sites (despite them having little to nothing to do with the site's content).

Porn keywords and keyphrases

A few years ago I learned that analytics is a powerful weapon against malware and malicious hack attacks. The Gumblar virus infected hundreds of thousands of web servers, and one of my websites was among them.

Gumblar is insidious. It uses encrypted PHP code (which was how I finally recognized it) to inject malicious and porn white links into webpages. The links are invisible to you or me, but not to Google. Google faithfully indexes your content that now contains thousands of links to porn sites and, of course, your traffic starts to spike in the most unusual way.

I won't repeat some (or any, for that matter) of the search phrases for which that site began to rank on. Suffice to say that a lot of you out there are pretty nasty ;) Language that would make a drill sergeant bashful, I swear.

Jokes aside, though. Keeping a close eye on my analytical data saved me further embarrassment there. Who would have thought?

High ranking SEO keywords (Still fairly normal)

Apparently Google thinks Site prebuilder is a valuable resource in the following areas:

• easy I get 12000 impressions a month from Google alone. Why? I can't rightly say - it's not even in my top twenty keywords.
• sharing Again, sharing is great but I don't talk about it too much.
• of vs off Really?? Is that such an issue?
• don't text and drive slogans Makes sense I guess.
• position Getting uncomfortably close to the Gumblar issue again.
• cows Ok, I wrote one article that explained marketing definitions with reference to cows, and now I'm a leading authority on bovines.
• wrong choice A bit of a self defeating keyphrase to rank highly on.
• stupid internet I'll bring it up with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, next time we chat.

Long tail keywords (What are people thinking?)

Here are some really odd ones that I dug up from the bottom of my SEO keyword pile:

• слоган Wait, what?
• big lunds Everyone should have these.
• النجاح Ah yes; my favorite subject.
• real human eyeball I wouldn't want to guess how I convert this traffic.
• bounce the bouncer Someone got beat up this weekend.
• business bluse Blues? I suspect the question is also the issue that business is having.
• toe names Bill, Frank, John, Mike... Did I forget any?
• landing strip I'll assume this was a pilot in an emergency.
• who dat ninja That's right. He's so fast you didn't get a good look.
• sword of ipos Something Facebook needs to ward off investors when they go public.
• yoda I'm tight with the force.
• hello david Hi.
• megadeth killing is my business... and business is good WTF?
• bloyg Don't give up your day job just yet.

That's the first time I've actually looked past the first few hundred keywords. I'm a little shaken, so I'll leave it there. I'll follow up when I can summon the courage to see the rest ;)

What does your site rank highly on that it shouldn't? Share your bizarre, weird and oddest SEO keywords and phrases in the comments or reply to this post on Twitter and Google+. I'll nominate a most bizarre keyword award.