Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog: Using Keywords

Com­pleted So Far:

My blog is up and run­ning, and begin­ning to look pretty good. I have devel­oped my list of pow­er­ful key­words and keyphrases, and now I will look at where and how to use these key­words and keyphrases.

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New Devel­op­ments:

You have taken the time to care­fully select pow­er­ful key­words that not only rep­re­sent your site, but are also being used to in search engines to find sites like yours.

Now the trick is to effec­tively use these key­words in ways that help help search engines iden­tify which words on your site are key­words and which are not. Unfor­tu­nately, you can’t just tell a search engine which key­words you have used on each page, you have to show them your key­words.  The fol­low­ing guide­lines will help you direct search engines to your site’s keywords:

1. use one pri­mary key­word per page, sup­ported by two or three sec­ondary key­words. Use your list of pow­er­ful key­words to select one pri­mary key­word and a cou­ple of sec­ondary key­words for each page of your site. The pri­mary key­word should be placed in all of the major place­ment spots (more below on these), with the sec­ondary key­words scat­tered through­out the page’s con­tent. A sec­ondary key­word from one page could be used as a pri­mary key­word on another page (and vice versa).
   
2. place your pri­mary key­word in the page’s title and in all head­ings and sub­head­ings used on the page. If you don’t nor­mally break your con­tent into smaller chunks by using sub­head­ings, you should prob­a­bly start. More on the use­ful­ness of sub­head­ings in my next post, which will be about “Content”.
3. place your pri­mary and sec­ondary key­words effec­tively through­out your con­tent, par­tic­u­larly in, but not lim­ited to, the first few sen­tences. Don’t over use key­words. An appro­pri­ate key­word den­sity is gen­er­ally thought to be between 3% and 5% of your word count. So, if you have 250 words on a page, between 8 and 13 of those words should be your key­words (or 3 to 5 key­words for every 100 words of con­tent). Key­words should not affect the read­abil­ity of the copy, they should appear nat­u­rally in sen­tences and para­graphs that are gram­mat­i­cally correct.
4. high­light key­words by using bold or ital­ics on them, or by under­lin­ing them.
5. place key­words in and around hyper­links. Never use ‘click here’ to iden­tify an hyper­link. If you can’t place a key­word in the hyper­link, itself, then use key­words around the hyper­links. Search engines are attracted to links, so will very likely notice these keywords.
6. place key­words in bul­leted lists.
7. if you use Word­Press to cre­ate your blog, use both Cat­e­gories and Tags to list key­words that are rel­e­vant to that post.
8. use your strongest key­word, the one that is most rep­re­sen­ta­tive of your entire site,  in the site’s URL, in the site’s name (if at all pos­si­ble) and in the site’s title and/or subtitle.
9. remem­ber to key­word opti­mize any Word doc­u­ments or .pdf files that you attached to pages on your site.

Beau­ti­fully made hand-blown glass fish, hid­den amongst the green­ery like pow­er­ful key­words hid­den on a website.

There are a few other extremely effec­tive places where you can place key­words,  but they involve HTML cod­ing.

Access­ing and chang­ing HTML cod­ing on pages, posts and in .pdf files can be a bit intim­i­dat­ing for any­one not used to HTML cod­ing, so I will leave post­ing about this until later in this series, to when I post on Advanced Key­word Strategies.

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Next Step:

Writ­ing for the web is dif­fer­ent from writ­ing for other types of media.  The next post in the series, which will be pub­lished on Wednes­day, looks as some of the tips and tricks involved with writ­ing effec­tively for the Internet.

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If you liked this post, you can read this series on Search Engine Opti­miz­ing Your Blog from the begin­ning by going to the Intro­duc­tion post.

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