If you’re blogging then you will almost certainly have heard about keyword search optimization. There are many ways to get traffic to your blog, but the best free method is to appear in the search engines for relevant keywords. Searchers will then click through to your blog to find what you’re looking for.
Although the search engines may include your site in results when you take advantage of keyword search optimization or not, you can give them a helping hand. By doing keyword research, finding highly searched keywords, and then using them appropriately in your content, you can make sure that the search engines rank you higher for these terms.
Keyword Density
When writing using keywords, the number of times you include a given keyword throughout the content is known as “keyword density”. For example, if your blog post is 400 words long and contains 4 instances of the keyword, this means that you’ve got a 1% keyword density (one instance of the keyword per 100 words). There is debate about how much you should use the keywords, but it’s often recommended you use them at least once per 100 words.
Where you use the keywords is also important. You should include them:
- At the beginning of the title
- Within the first sentence
- Within the last sentence
- And spread through the article body.
Keep It Natural
Although keyword search optimization is an important strategy for many bloggers, it’s also important to sound natural. After all, it’s not just the search engines looking at your content – there are real human readers too! And they’re likely to be turned off if it sounds like you’ve just stuffed in your keyword as many times as possible.
This is why it’s important to work on writing a good blog post first, and worry about the keywords you’re including second. No matter how well you’ve incorporated keyword search optimization into your article, your site isn’t going to do well unless you can keep readers interested with well crafted, interesting content that’s written with their needs in mind.
Too Many Keywords Can Have The Opposite Effect
Although we all know that it’s useful to include keywords in your blog posts, including too many can even turn the search engines off. The giants like Google are well aware that bloggers and internet marketers are trying to improve their rankings with methods like this, so they won’t reward you for taking shortcuts and stuffing your content with too many keywords. If they did, it would be too easy for low quality rankings to get to the top of the rankings.
Keywords Aren’t Everything
Following on from the point above, it’s important to realize that Google is looking at a lot more than just keywords to rank your site. It takes into account who links back to your site, how you link to your own pages, how well your site is laid out and, importantly, whether your website actually delivers the information your visitors are searching for.
Keyword search optimization is definitely something you should be incorporating into your blog posts if you want to take advantage of free search engine traffic. However, it’s also important to work on the quality of your blog. The visitors will follow.