About Keywords
The Importance Of Keywords
What is all the fuss about keywords, well when it comes to blogging, we all want traffic and to get it we have to be a bit clever. This is where keywords come into play, but the clever bit is to research keywords a little so that we do not end up competing with to many other blogs or websites that are chasing the same keywords.
Search Engine Optimization
Known as SEO, this is something that as a blogger you will need to learn about and practise to give your blog a chance to be spotted in the search engines. So this is how it works, when people want to find out information on a certain subject they will go to a search engine and type in the subject they are looking for, as a example lets take the title of this post.
I am targeting the search term “keyword”, so people wanting to know information on keywords may type into the search engine “keyword”. But if I just use keyword on its own I would be competing with 473,000 000 other sites. Now that is a lot of sites to compete with and the chances of this post being indexed on the first page of the search engines is very slim.
So if I add an “s” on the end “keywords” I will compete against 364,000 000 which is still far to high although it has come down a little. So I add “about” in front and it becomes “about keywords” which brings it down to 72,700 which is a lot more manageable, I can live with that, but just to show this off a little more, if I take off the “s” and use “about keyword” it then comes down to 60,900, even better.
Permalinks
Although the title may read “About keywords”, if I edit my permalink in this post to “about keyword” then I will be targeting that phrase and have the lower competition, which you will see in the browser heading, reading “about keyword” even though the title is still “About Keywords”.
Ranking High
This all aids to get your blog posts ranking high in the search engines and it is just one aspect of SEO and the higher your posts are ranked in the search engines the more chance that the people searching for the information that you are providing on your blog will have in finding your blog posts and therefore your blog.
This is an easy habit to get into when writing posts and will help you to rank higher in the search engines. So before you start writing your post, checkout optimizing your post title with a keyword that has a good amount of searches and not to much competition and you will be practising a good SEO technique.
The Procedure
Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (it is a free tool) and type in your keyword phrase to see how many people are searching for it, if nobody is searching for it then it is probably not a great keyword, so think of another one. Then put the same keyword phrase in the Google Search Engine with quotes like this “about keyword” and check how many competing sites there are, I always try and keep it under 100,000 on most of my posts, the odd one with high competition does not matter.
Just One Piece
There is a lot to complete SEO and it takes a lot to master, but this is just one piece of the SEO puzzle and it is a good place to start when trying to get your blog noticed and indexed in a good position in the search engines. It doesn’t take that long and is a good habit to get into when writing your posts.
On occasions you will find some real gems that have more people searching for them than there are sites competing for them, with these I have been indexed very quickly within the top three positions on Google, so it is worth it because they are my best performing posts.
