Keywords & Blogging, Part 1
ByWhy Use Keywords on Your Blog?
The Internet is a place where anyone can find information on just about any subject. If you want any one or two of these billions of people to find you there – which is why you started blogging in the first place, right? – giving them what they desire is the key. Using keywords in your blog posts and pages is the way to begin.
What are Keywords?
This word has been tossed around a lot on the Web. Keywords are the words that people use to search for information in cyberspace. Of course, every word is not a keyword. Some words like “the,” “of,” and others are too common and are usually excluded from search results. Only the main words are used in the search parameters.
Based on those entered words, a series of results are returned for the viewer. Usually the results are in the millions but no one is going to look at all of those entries. So, if you are not featured on the first page (or maybe as far as second or third pages), you might as well be entry number 999,999.
Use Your Content
The world is being educated now about bots and spiders. They are icky but they perform a great service for your business website. They crawl your articles, headlines, picture tags, categories, and unique pages for the words that searchers enter. If they are found, you get ranked for that word.
Is that all? Of course it’s not. I left out that the number of times the word appears (keyword density) is highly important. The crawly things are looking for how many times that word is mentioned to calculate where you stand compared to other content using the same word. They are looking for “relevance” – how relevant the search term is to the content on your page.
(Beware of over-doing it, though. See the post on Keywords: To Stuff or Not To Stuff.)
The hang-up is going to be finding those words. And, for each topic of interest, there are an untold number of words that can be entered alone or in the form of a phrase.
What you have to remember is that without the keywords, it will be next to impossible to reach your target market. Some use the “net casting” approach and try to appeal to everyone using generic wording in their articles and advertisements. Not only are you going to get a large amount of uninterested people but you are also going to waste money doing it.
Keywords narrow down the field to only the people who are likely to use your product or service. Just as you would do with ads, you will want to test out these keywords to see the rate of return you get from your efforts. But at least you will start off on the right path.
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[...] doubt you have already been playing the keyword game. (If not, you can check out this series of articles on keyword [...]
[...] words that visitors use in the search boxes are termed “keywords” by Internet marketers. (Read this article for more detailed information about what keywords are.) When you use the same words in various [...]