Blog SEO Tips: Using Keywords for Blog Optimization

June 29th, 2008 / Blogging Tips, WordPress SEO

One of the most basic, yet highly effective things you need to consider when doing blog optimization is using keywords to indicate search engine spiders what your posts are about. The more relevant to the page’s content, the better the search engine ranking.
Keyword optimization is part of on-page SEO, which means that it is a part of the optimization you’ll make on your blog’s code.

What you should know right from the start is that keywords can give your blog posts a boost in rankings or get your blog out of the first and most important search results. It all comes down to how well you’re using them and how relevant they are to your content.

Rules of keyword optimization

Since you’re reading this, I have no doubt that you understand how important well-researched keywords are and that you’re willing to make better use of them. These are some of the most important things you need to consider:

Things to do

  • Consider using keywords relevant to your article;
  • If the keywords are somehow related to each other, that’s a plus (for example: internet marketing, online marketing, search engine marketing);
  • Use different keywords for different blog posts. In most cases, search engines will return two results from you blog at most, so having five or six posts optimized for the same set of keywords would be a waste of content;
  • Write your article first, but with the right keywords in mind, not the other way around;
  • Use your most important keyword(s) in the title tag. If you’re using a SEO plugin, you can set a different page title than that of your blog post;
  • Use those keywords in the META description too;
  • Use the keywords in the title of your blog post and preferably in the first phrase or paragraph of your article;
  • Edit the post slug (permalink) so that it contains the most important keyword and also try to keep it as short as possible;
  • Place the keyword(s) a few more times (don’t overdo it) throughout the article in a humanly natural order and context;
  • If there are other older relevant posts on your blog, try to create backlinks from them using the selected keywords as anchor text (same goes for external incoming links).

Things to avoid

  • Don’t target too many keywords. Use as many keywords as you feel that are relevant to your content which means they are present on the page and have value to a visitor. A list of 50 keywords means that most probably at least 40 of them are almost totally irrelevant;
  • Don’t use irrelevant keywords. If your post is about NASA’s recent trip to Mars, I don’t know how Demi Moore or Vi*gra would fit in the picture;
  • Using text formatting on some keywords in your content is OK. Bolding everything out is not;
  • Avoid duplicating keywords in your META tags;
  • Placing a list of comma separated keywords in your title tag and META description is a big NO. Write something natural and appealing to humans;
  • Avoid keyword stuffing. Don’t fill your blog post with keywords only to increase the keyword density. It is unnatural, provides a negative user experience and will probably get you penalized by search engines.

Conclusions

Some say that keywords don’t really matter when it comes to search engine rankings, and since everyone is entitled to an opinion, I will disagree with that. Same people say that their blogs or websites rank high even if they neglected keyword optimization. That is true, but I’d like to see how well they perform when they’ll be competing with a well optimized blog or website when similar factors are on the table, like: almost same age (possibly younger), number of indexed pages, number of backlinks etc.

Keyword optimization is part of a much bigger and complex process. Acting blind in front of it is like sticking your head in the sand, hoping that if you don’t see anyone, nobody will see you.

Next week, we’ll talk about choosing relevant keywords and discuss a few keyword suggestion tools.

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This article has 18 comments

  • Joel
    June 30th, 2008

    Those tips where great Alex. I am actually following most of them and are very useful… :)

  • Hendry Lee
    June 30th, 2008

    I find it helpful to include secondary keywords, synonyms, stems and thematically related keywords.

    However, I will only keep those in mind so they get into the article naturally.

    Linking to authority sites and pages with relevant keywords fro within your article is also important to hint search engines about the topic of the article/post.

  • Motorbeam.com
    November 2nd, 2008

    Very interesting tips. Keywords can be targeted via SEO packs as you can enter more then one keyword.

  • RASHI
    November 27th, 2008

    CAN YOU PLEASE GUIDE, HOW TO INCORPORATE KEYWORDS FOR BETTER INCREASED TRAFFIC.

    THANKS.

    RASHI

  • Andrew
    February 12th, 2009

    Great post, thank you. I was always curious about whether the meta title should be the same, what to use for the slug, and how to fill out the keywords in my SEO plugin.

  • Winson John
    March 2nd, 2009

    Great tips and very informative. Many people miss the point of optimizing their permalink. There is lots of debate, which is better permalink. I am wondering Alex which is better permalink for blogger. I mean to include date or category or just stick with direct link which I believe will make your website link more SEO friendly to search engines.In my blog http://incomeideas.net I am just using /%postname%/ structure to keep it short.

  • gio blog
    March 10th, 2009

    Great blog! It’s always so nice to be inspired

  • Blog Seo
    March 14th, 2009

    Hey i love this blog,, i am a recent visitor to this blog and everytime i visit here i see something new and inspiring.. i wanna be a successful blogger in future and I am sure tips from blogsessive would help me achieve dat

  • Internet Marketers
    April 26th, 2009

    A good way to get keyword suggestions is to use Google Adwords keyword tool. First, you need an Adwords account. Then start a new PPC campaign for your site and use the keyword tool to find not only keywords that people have searched on but also their relative popularties.

  • Avelina
    June 9th, 2009

    Keywords are the most important part or characteristic of a blog or website.

  • Sue
    June 11th, 2009

    Choosing competitive keywords so your topic is found is important too, but not too competitive.

    Typically single keywords are very difficult to compete for while keywords phrases are more apt to be found by people searching for your subject matter because they are more likely to show up on the first pages of search results.

  • Kevin
    June 11th, 2009

    Good post, I always keen about keyword optimization.

  • Emax
    August 15th, 2009

    Am running a skin care blog with no traffic. How can i benefit from keywords?

  • ravi
    September 28th, 2009

    Great post, thank you. I was always curious about whether the meta title should be the same, what to use for the slug, and how to fill out the keywords in my SEO plugin

  • Muhammad Umer
    January 8th, 2010

    thanx for valuable tips: )

  • Rana Sinha
    January 20th, 2010

    Thanks for the useful tips. I’ll start utilising them.

  • kenntrix
    February 2nd, 2010

    thanks for the tips.

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