Written by Keyword Selection AND Keyword Optimization
There is so much information on keyword optimization, it is really hard to know where to begin. First off, keyword selection is a crucial first step. If you choose a niche that is too broad, it will take a long time to get to the top of your keyword’s search engine results. Aim a little lower at first and start ranking for your long tail keywords. After some rankings, go ahead and do more keyword research and use a keyword suggestion tool.
Let’s pick a topic like Internet Marketing. That is what this blog is about, so let’s use our theme as a keyword topic. Go to Google’s external keyword tool (use that phrase in the search bar and the url will come up immediately, Google does not need any more link love from me) and type in “internet marketing” to see what comes up.
Here are some of the results: internet marketing business, affiliate internet marketing, internet marketing online, internet marketing advertising, and on and on.
What do we do with this? Well, I take two equivalent terms and see how many competing sites we have. Let me show you an example: internet marketing strategy and internet marketing promotion each have an average of 27,100 searches per month. Let’s see the competition. Internet marketing strategy has 827,000 competing pages (wow). OK, let’s see our other keyword phrase’s competition. Internet marketing promotion has 146,000 competing pages for roughly the same search volume. Which one would you pick? Keep going through the list until you have around 20 keyword phrases. These will be your inspiration for article titles and topics.
Now that we have our keywords, how do we optimize for those keywords? Well, if you are using a blog like me (and you should), then use your keyword phrase in the title, meta tags, description, etc. Also, use header tags like this
Keyword Selection AND Keyword Optimization
Make sure that you mention the keywords in the first and last paragraphs to keep the Google Bot happy.
Some more tips that are useful for keyword optimization are including related keywords in your posts and if blogging, using related keyword article titles in your sidebar.
Hope this article on keyword selection and keyword optimization helps you structure your blogs for SEO.
TomG.
