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Content is king they say but using keywords, understanding the keyword methods will make sure you are on the road of being king. Today search is a part and parcel of our daily lives, it gets tougher and tougher to compete in the Information world. How do you plan reaching your readers if you have not done your keywords research for Post Titles and Blog Posts? There are always two sides to a story. So how to choose keywords, is a million dollar question.

If you asked me about keywords and optimisation a year ago i would be like ya i guess it has an impact. I was naive and still am to some extent. When i started my journey blogging i was literally a newbie and wrote what my mind felt about a specific web topic. I never ever planned what my title should contain or what  the best keywords I should target, etc. I am still learning so what i contribute on this post today may not hold true 3 months from now. That’s how fast the search engine rules are changing. Over the past few months i have been blogging almost daily and each day i tried new things that the SEO gurus recommend.

I would follow some of the techniques and then forget about it after a few days. Uffff i hate to complicate my life with too many to do’s. This month i noticed a spike in my traffic and I was trying to figure out what could be the reason. Most of the traffic that visited me during the spike was through search engines. So i sat down with my brother who loves the science behind search engines and asked him what may be the reason. He analysed my blog post and guess what, i had used some of the best keyword method that allowed google to help me gain traffic. I was excited so i started doing more of the same thing as it seemed to work and i was getting to the 1st page for some of my blog posts.

Image Credit: fakelvis

Today i don’t want to go through a debate of whether its important to have keywords in your post title or is it better to write a catchy headline? I believe both are important because what’s the point of being on the 1st page of google and not noticed? Doing keyword research is magic, it’s fun at times and you can get sucked into it. I don’t want you to to be sucked into it so let’s just break this down step by step.

High Traffic Keywords or low competition keywords:

Now in the SEO world the experts have said there are 2 ways to go about targeting search keywords, you can either focus on the high traffic keywords or you could target keywords relevant to your niche with lower traffic. Most SEO guys say don’t go for the popular keywords so i listened. The keywords advice that these professionals provide has improved the way i look at structuring my blog now.

Strategies for a novice entrepreneur on choosing keywords

Last few days we have gone through the exercise of figuring out :

Now its about gaining traffic in the long run. So here are a few steps that i started following in my plan when writing for you.
I work on a shoe string budget with my blog not because i cannot afford it but because i want to assist my start up buddies to work on a shoe string budget to get from point A to point B. If you do this right you are building your plan to get attention through organic search results and not buying keywords.

Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool:

This is a free keyword search tool by google that you can use to get started. Ofcourse there are other keyword tools that you can pay to perform in depth research but when you are starting out google can do you lotsa good

I found this video that’s a keyword tutorial on how to use Google Adwords Keyword tool. He explains it well just be patient and go through the video

The next video that follows gives you keyword advice of how you can conduct keyword research by finding popular related words, check it out.

Use Keywords in Title Tags

Once we know what our keywords are the next step is to use these keywords in a manner that makes sense to humans. You may have a long list of keywords but when choosing the keywords for your title tag it’s better to start the title with a keyword. This allows the search engine as well as your readers to know what the post is all about. So for example if we want to talk about the return on investment using social media techniques we could phrase it like

Keywords in Heading Tags h1, h2:

In WordPress when you are writing a post or in any CMS application you have an editor, when writing make sure you use heading 1 and heading 2 and this builds structure along with enabling search engines to understand what your post is covering . So within your headings make sure you use keywords.

Keywords within the Blog Content

Now this areas of course you want to have some relevant keywords but that does not mean stuff your blog post with keywords from hell. SEO experts talk about keyword density and the safe range is around 3% – 5%. Anything higher could get you in trouble or anything lower will decrease your chances of ranking higher. When i understood keyword density i wanted a way to calculate this for each of my posts, so initially i searched for terms like “Keyword Density Tool” or “Keyword Density Calculator.” you will find a few free tools but since i write in MS word this is what i do

There you got your keyword density.

Keywords in URL

Before you publish your post it’s worth taking some time and making sure that your url has the right keywords. For this if you are using wordpress make sure that your teachnical person setting up your wordpress blog has created the right permalink structure. Once upon a time i think the default structure for the url in wordpress use to be /%year%/%month/%postname% . If you have the default structure then you need to change this and the safest way to do this is by using a wordpress plugin such as
Dean’s Permalink Migration tool
This tool allows you to transition from the old structure to the new structure with ease. So ask your technical guy to change the structure from the old way to a custom structure such as /%postname%

Keywords in Meta Description

I use to always skip this due to my lazy self. Or i would copy what i have written for the start of my article. This I have now realized is incorrect. This is one of the main areas as this content is shown in the search queries and displayed when the results are found. See the example below:

It makes sense right you will read the title and the meta description to then decide whether you want to review this website. So remember to use keyowrds within the meta description but sparingly so that the sentences do make sense

In WordPress you have some key plugins that can help you along the way to make your blog post search engine friendly such as
All in One SEO WordPress plugin , Greg’s High Performance SEO

So here’s to your success and hopefully these tips will get you started on how to structure the content more effectively for your readers to find you along with search engines to notice you