18 uses of keywords within blog posts

I thought we’d take a break from my Magic Moment series about Google Analytics today and give you something else to think about.

This blog will be undergoing a transformation very soon (perhaps you’ve already noticed my new logos) and as this includes enhancement and optimising your blog, here’s a post about keywords:

1. Find out what your keywords are. These are particular words or phrases that people are searching for at this moment. By putting them in your posts it will make them more attractive to the search engines. Use Google Adwords and Wordtracker to find them for you.
2. Choose the best 10 keywords and plan out your posts within an editorial calendar. Remember they are only valid for the next week or so, so select some suitable subject matter from them and compose a few drafts.
3. Read other blog posts that are in vogue (use Google Alerts and other RSS feeds to research into this) to find out what subjects are being talked about and use their keywords.
4. Your post’s title is a highly important element of your post, so make sure your keyword is placed within it. Your headline also needs to be attractive, enticing, contain added value, a question that resonates with your reader’s needs, or a controversial statement that demands a reaction.
5. Edit the permalink (also known as a post slug) of your post. This is the automatically generated URL each post receives once it’s published. Abbreviate it to include the most important keywords purely for search engine indexing purposes.
6. Liberally use the keywords throughout your post. The most prominent areas should be the first line of the first paragraph, somewhere in the middle and in the last paragraph. Don’t use more then 10% saturation of keywords or you will upset both your readers and the search engines.
7. You can vary how you use the keywords within your post. Remember spiders don’t understand punctuation like we do, so you could separate your keyphrase with a full stop (period) for added variation.
8. The use of keywords in a list (like this post) works well, as they are easily scannable, making the content more digestible. It also avoids heavy, long paragraphs. Bullet points are a good alternative.
9. Use sub-headlines to break up a post for easier reading. These should also be packed with secondary keywords for extra emphasis, but don’t make them monotonous.
10. Using links within your post has many advantages. They provide access to other posts or pages within your blog, forcing spider activity and allowing readers to venture further to find out more. This also helps to reduce the bounce rate within your blog’s statistics.
11. There is also a plugin available called Yet Another Related Posts Plugin that automatically generates links to suitable relevant posts related to the subject at the bottom of your post. Sometimes it struggles or gets it wrong, but this is better than nothing!
12. Make sure the wording within your post’s links, whether they are internal or external, are contextual. This means the links contain the keywords that are relevant to where it is directed. Search engine spiders award brownie points if keyworded links successfully connect with its destination’s relevance, ultimately much better than just ‘click here’.
13. When using pictures in your posts, remember to include keywords in the title, alternative text and caption. The first two are not visible to the reader, but are to spiders, and picture captions are the third most read item on a blog behind the headline and subheaders.
14. A post’s tags are in fact keywords, and definitely should be relevant to the post. Apart from your chosen ones for the post, search out other relevant words and phrases within your post’s content to use as tags.
15. If you have set up categories based around your keywords, then that will be an added boost to your keyword saturation.
16. Install a plugin such as the All in one SEO Pack, which allows you to write another keyword rich headline, submit more keyword laiden tags and provide a keyword filled description for search engine indexing.
17. If you can arrange it, make sure any incoming links to your blog from external sources contain keywords within their textual makeup (see point 12). These may include blog carnivals, guest blogging, social networking feeds and sharing, posting on social media groups and associated pages, and links from other relevant websites, including your own.
18. Work out the best time of day to publish your posts. It may be when your target audience is most likely to be online, or at a time when the search engines will not be distracted by other competitive posts.

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Alice Elliott

Alice Elliott has been explaining blogging to beginner bloggers for almost two decades, specialising in using ordinary, everyday language to make the process as simple as possible so that anybody can understand.

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