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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If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!

With everything up and running, I have begun preparing a list of powerful keywords that I can use to build my blog’s content around.

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New Developments:

Keywords and Keyphrases are the words and phrases that people use to search with when they do an online, i.e. Google or Yahoo! search. The more people who search using the same keywords you have used in your blog, the more likely it is that you will have visitors to your site.

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Note:

When using keyphrases, you should limit the number of words used to between 2 and 5 words. Using more than 5 words reduces the effectiveness of your keyphrase.

For the rest of this series, I will be using the word ‘keyword’ to mean both keywords and keyphrases.

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Selecting powerful keywords or keyphrases is not always an easy task but, in the long run, is worth the effort.

Once you have identified the types of pages you will be adding to your blog, and have some idea of the content for each page, it’s time to make a ‘seed list’ of potential keywords that you will build into the content.

Some tips for selecting powerful keywords include:

Brainstorming: Brainstorm possible words and phrases that describe your product or service either by getting ideas from other people, or mind-mapping, etc .

Finding powerful keywords requires a bit of research.

1. Using Non-specific keywords, that identify general categories, e.g. digital cameras or cars;
2. Using product specific keywords, that identify specific products, e.g. Nikon D80 or 2005 Honda Accord;
3. Using location specific keywords, that identify a specific city or region, e.g. Toronto Nikon Dealer, Guelph Honda;
4. Using word variations, e.g instead of car use truck, van, SUV, or auto, automobile, vehicle
5. Check out your competitor’s websites, what words or phrases are frequently repeated.

You can usually generate a fairly extensive list of potential keywords just by brainstorming, or you can also dust off the old thesaurus, see what word variations you can use to expand your list with. At this point, you can either begin integrating words from this list into your copy, or  you can go one step further and use a keyword analysis program.

Keyword Analysis Programs: A keyword analysis program determines which keywords people are already using to search for your products or services, and which of these keywords are being used most often. Some keyword analysis programs will even provide you with alternative keywords that can be used instead of your original keyword. Most search engines have some kind of keyword analysis tool that you can access.

At Google there are three tools that you can play with:

1. Google Search-Based Keyword Tool: http://www.google.com/sktool/
2. Google Adwords Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
3. Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends

Another great keyword analysis tool is SEO Blogger by Wordtracker. Wordtracker is a company that specializes in keyword tracking, analysis, etc, and offers several ‘tools’ that you can use to do keyword analysis with, some free, some not so free. Free downloadable tools include a Wordtracker toolbar that works with both Microsoft’s IE browser and the SEO Blogger that works on Firefox. Basically the SEO Blogger plugin sits as an icon at the bottom of the Firefox browser page. When you click on the icon, a column appears on the left hand side of your browser window. Just type-in a keyword and the program generates a list of alternative keywords plus an indication of how popular both your keyword and the alternative keywords are. This plugin is very easy to install and use.  You can download a copy of SEO Blogger at http://labs.wordtracker.com/seo-blogger/

Wordtracker publishes a free online tool, Keyword Questions, found at http://labs.wordtracker.com/keyword-questions that is also fun to play with. You type in a keyword and Keyword Questions provides a list of questions that have been used over the past year to research the market your keyword represents. You can easily pull new keywords from the questions listed here.

There are other keyword analysis tools available, like KeywordDiscovery at: http://www.keyworddiscovery.com and ClickTracks at: http://www.clicktracks.com but both of these are subscription-based services and cost to use.

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Next Step:

Now that you have generated a dynamic list of powerful keywords, it’s time to start using the keywords and keyphrases. Monday’s post will look at how to effectively integrate keywords into your blog.

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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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If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!