If you know me or have attended one of my speeches or classes, then you know that I am a big believer in writing more content for your website if you want to get more traffic. My main reason for saying that is because the job of the search engines is to crawl websites and index pages by their topic and the only way you can get more web pages in the search engines, is to write more content.
If you want to kick your blog posts up a notch, then you’ll want to include keywords. Keywords are the words that people type into a search engine when they are looking for something. For example: let’s say that I am looking to plant an herb garden, (which I would never do because I kill everything that is supposed to grow in dirt), but let’s say it anyway and I want to know what kind of plants to grow. I would open a search engine like Google and type into the search bar something like: “herb garden plants.” In this example, “herb garden plants” would be the keyword phrase.
Now it’s time for the search engines to go to work and provide yme with some websites because they are responsible for delivering the web pages that are on the topic “herb garden plants.”
It just seems to make sense that if the search engines are responsible for indexing all the content there is on the web as well as provide the web pages for people to see and when people are looking for something, they use “keywords”, then you should always use keywords in your blog posts. How to Write a Blog Post Using Keywords?
Where to use keywords
Even though search engines may scan just about everything on a website, they do give more importance to some words than they do others. For instance, a title would be more important than a heading and a heading would be more important than a word in a paragraph.
So, here are some places you can use keywords in your blog posts that will help your rankings:
- Meta Description – the descriptions below the post’s title on Google’s search results pages.
- Page Title – this is usually your post title.
- Headers – also known as paragraph headings.
- Alternative Tags – provides alternate text when an image is used.
- Anchor Text – the word or words that link to another web page.
Some things to know
If you don’t write your meta description manually, the search engines automatically take the first 150-160 characters of the article. Even though meta descriptions aren’t a factor in Google’s ranking, they do give searchers a summary of what they will get by reading the post. So it may not help with SEO but it could help your click through rate.
When choosing the title of your blog post, keywords are important, but you also want to write your blog post so that it makes sense to your audience. So if the title sounds stupid with the keyword in it, then leave it out. No one wants to read an article with a title that doesn’t make sense.
Paragraph heading are used to give you an idea of what the paragraph is going to be about. They also break up the content so that it is easier to read. They are not to be used as a way to style your content. If you want some part of your text to bigger and bolder than the other part, don’t put that text in a “heading 3” just so it looks good. The rule is that there should only be one “heading 1” per article. You can only use a “heading 4” tag once a “heading 3” has been used and you can only use a “heading 3” once a “heading 2” has been used and so on.
People read a web page differently than they read the printed word. People tend to scan the web page looking for headings, bolded text, and bullet points.
Remember that it takes time for things to start happening. When you first have your website up, you won’t get much traffic going to it. However, the more content you write and put on your site, the more traffic you will get. So don’t fret, you may be the only one reading your blog posts in the beginning but it won’t stay that way forever.
Did you know that Print and Web Designer does keyword research?