Wherever you research anything about Search Engine Optimization, you will always run across something that has to do with keywords. Keywords are essentially the groundwork of optimizing your blog which also, you may not know, sets some of the goals in your blogging experience.

How does it do that?

Let’s go back a few posts, to where I define SEO terms. As I mentioned in that post (indirectly), keywords are specific and significant words that represent your blog. These are the words/phrases that “represent” your blog in search engines. For example, if your blog is about making money online, your keywords would be the “key” “words” that represent your blog, in this case “making money online”. If you Google “making money online“, there will be around 48,100,000 results and your goal would be to optimize your blog to a point where it is one of the top of these listing pages. Of course, this is somewhat nearly impossible considering there is so much competition, but what if we found words that had less competition?

This basically means, find some primary keywords you wish to target them and work with these keywords.

I Found My Primary Keywords, What Now?

The goal here is to choose keywords similar to your primary keywords that you will use to boost your rankings that don’t have much competition, and also those that people actually search for. You may think you know what people search for in order to find you, but in reality many people are far off in this. So, in order to be correct in our keywords, we have some handy tools that we may use:

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Great tool which gives you keyword ideas based on either the keywords you enter or based off of a URL you enter (your site URL).
• Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool – Another keyword suggestion tool that gives suggestions revolving the keywords you wish to target.
• Thesaurus.com – This one is my personal favorite. The above tools will generate lists of keywords that users search for, and Thesaurus.com will help you fill up your list even more with synonyms that more often than not, are not showing up in those tools, but are still searched widely.

After researching the keywords you’re trying to rank on top in, you should have a compiled list of many different variations, synonyms, and related words that will still point to the primary keywords you’re trying to rank in. Now, keep this list close to you and use these keywords when blogging.

Tips on Using your Keywords

1. Use your keywords in post titles – Using your keywords will give those keywords more importance making those posts rank higher.
2. Use Keywords in Anchor Links – When you advertise your site or blog, the “anchor words” are those words that are in the title of your link. So if you’re blogging about making money online, your anchor words would be “Making Money Online” and not “mycooldomainname.com”. When search engines find the links to your site, they’ll see those keywords in your links titles and will already direct themselves to associating your site with those words.
3. Use your Primary Keywords in Your Domain Name/Site Name – This generally gives a great boost to your rankings if your keyword is included in your domain name. You can see my domain name has nothing to do with my keywords or “designers” and “web development”, which is why those keywords are on the very top of my blog. Include your main keywords in your blog title, and meta tags to tell search engines that this is what you’re ultimately targeting.
4. Use Keywords in your Post - Tip #1 was about post titles, this one is about post content. Use your keywords from your keyword list in your post content because, although your post content may not be relevant enough that it gets many searches, but when it does, users are much more guaranteed to click on your link because your post content is usually much more relevant than general keywords.
   

   IMPORTANT! Do not overuse the same keywords in your posts. Keep a keyword ratio of 4-5 (4-5 keywords per 100 words) otherwise Google and other search engines may throw you out for keyword spamming.

5. Use Keywords in Image Alt Tags – This may not apply to those who blog about things that do not relate much to visuals, but if you’re blogging about clothes, toys, photography, etc put in keywords in your image alt tags. You just can’t imagine the effect these may have.

That’s it for keywords and should basically set up the foundation of your blog key SEO elements. If you need to make some changes to your blog in order to match up with what I’m suggesting, DO IT NOW! Otherwise, all of your SEO efforts will result in lost time and worthless rankings.

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