This post is the second part of the Keyword Research and Search Engine Optimization tutorial series. Read the part 1: Keyword Research.
You have done your Keyword Research, and now you should utilize that information. You can use the keywords in your advertising campaign and the text links in those, and you can start optimizing your blog or spesific blog post for the keywords you found. Thus, you enter the world of Search Engine Optimization, SEO. The main purpose of SEO is to get Search Engine Traffic, which can be seen as a free way to driving traffic to your blog after it's done once.
Let's see what you can do with the list of keywords you have..
From Keyword Research Into Search Engine Optimization
You can use the information you found on the keywords and phrases to do optimization of your blog posts or articles in your website. To summarize, you would include the best search phrases and keywords you've found in your article, with the best being high search volume and low competition, as that is a great starting point. This is called Search Engine Optimization, SEO.
With SEO, you would try to optimize the text for specific terms, keywords and phrases you want (the ones you found by doing keyword research). You must first consider your readers and keep the text natural. Second, pay attention to the total number of keyword occurrences on a page versus total number of words, known as Keyword Density. Most experts agree that 4-8% should be the maximum keyword density, but the specific percentage is not important at start, just remember to avoid going too far and fill the page with certain keyword.
Simple Search Engine Optimization for a Blog Post
First, do keyword research and try to find the best keywords and phrases for your post. If your post answers a certain question or offers a solution to a specific problem. Start by thinking what phrases would you use if you would have the same problem, use the keyword search tools to find the related terms, refine the terms until you find a list of keywords and phrases that you could use in your article.
Then if you want, check the competition for those words by looking how many results search engine finds for the exact match of the search terms, by using quotes around the terms, e.g. "how to fix my car". Choose the best keywords and phrases from your list, pick 1-12 and go with those. Take 1-3 of the keywords and phrases as main words, try to use them as the title and headers in addition to the text, and use the rest in the article text, but not in the headers or title.
Keep the list of keywords you have, and re-use the keywords in different posts and articles you write. Target different keywords in different blog posts and link to the other articles by using the main phrase or keyword of the target article.
Basic SEO principles for writing a blog post or article:
- Write your post naturally first, without thinking about keywords or SEO
- After the text is nearly done, read it through and see if you can replace some words or phrases with the keywords you found
- warning! don't go overboard and fill the whole text with the keywords, as this is known as keyword stuffing
- You might get penalized by search engines for keyword stuffing, and most of all, you'll drive away YOUR READERS.
- Use the good keyword phrases you found as headers in the text if applicable (using H1, H2, H3 html tags)
- Use the best keyword phrase you found in the title of your post (at the top, H1 tag).
Short Version of the Keyword Research and SEO Tutorial:
- look for natural search phrases that you think people use
- use keyword search tools to determine the best keywords
- refine and find the best phrases using the search tools
- write your text for the readers
- see if there is room for the keywords you found
- use the phrases as headlines and title if they fit naturally
Targeting these kind of keywords and phrases gets you going and targeting the high competition keywords comes later, as when shooting for the high competition keywords, the importance of keywords and phrases go down and the importance of popularity of your site goes up (simplifying the matter).
The basic SEO is quite simple as explained in this tutorial, but there's huge amount of information available on the subject if you want to know more, and all you have to do is search for it. Whatever you find first in the search engine is probably good, as SEO related terms are the most competitive keywords..
This post ends my two part post series that uncovered the basics of keyword research and search engine optimization. Read the part 1: Keyword Research.
