Keywords are prominent words that will be used to describe what your page or article is about. This will help you to be found by search engines. If you could boil your entire content down to only five important words, what would those be? What would you do with them?
Picking the right keywords
A page or article should have one single focus keyword. You can add an additional two to four keywords that relate to or support the primary choice. You may have to make some hard choices when figuring out what to leave out. That doesn’t mean you can’t ever mention other keywords in your blog postings. Just remember to stay focused and on-target and not drift into a place where your marketing becomes too vague. Keep coming back to your top five words and primary focus again and again.
Don’t approach it from the point of view of your industry. Put yourself in a potential client’s shoes. They may not be aware of all the brand names and phrases that you know. Think of the natural terms and names they’ll enter into a search. Google’s search algorithm rewards content that is written in natural sounding language. If you just drop a bunch of keywords onto a page without context, you’ll be downranked.
Where do keywords go?
You’ll need to position your chosen keywords in several places. To start with, your focus word should be in your post or page title. It should even be in the domain name of the website itself if you can swing it. Write the name around your focus word. This will make it very clear what your article is about, not just to readers but to the search engines as well.
Next, put your keywords in the meta-description of the page. Write a sentence or two that’s about 130 characters for this. Sum up the theme of your article using your keywords. If you’ve chosen well, this should be easy.
In years gone by, the “Keywords” tag on web pages was what you used. This is completely ignored by Google now in favor of the actual content on the page. You can put them in this spot only to remind yourself what they are, but this selection is not important.
The text of the article itself is one of the most important places. Google will analyze all of the words around them to make sure it’s a relevant piece of writing, and not just a bunch of random keywords on a page. Links to relevant content, either on your site or elsewhere, will help boost your ranking. Put your keywords in your image descriptions and the names of the files as well! It all works together to show Google that your page or article has value to the people who will be searching for it. Write naturally. Keep your sentences short and your words easy to understand. Run them through writing tools if you can to make sure you’re in the ballpark.
How long will it take me to get noticed?
SEO along without external marketing does not return immediate results. According to a recent article in Forbes, it can take about four to six months before you really start building traffic. Your traffic should keep building over the first year, but six months will be when you begin to see real activity. You have a long road ahead of you before you reach a peak. Keep in mind, this is done with a constant and planned out string of daily blog posts shared on social media.
This will be a large investment of time on your part. All of your articles have to be written with the best SEO practices, putting your keywords in all the right places with the right density. This could be several hours out of your week devoted to creating and sharing this content. If you can’t do it yourself, maybe you should consider hiring someone to do it for you.
Adwords vs unpaid SEO Keywords
Adwords is more of a targeted advertising program, where you’re bidding for keywords. You will see almost instant results from this campaign. The drawback is that it all goes away just as quickly when your ads turn off. If you’ve invested the time to build up your SEO, that will continue to keep working for you, even if you slow down on content creation. Keywords bought with Adwords only benefits you when you’re paying them.
If you’re new to Adwords, you should be careful. It’s easy to spend a lot of money without getting a return on your investment if you don’t know what you’re doing. It can be sort of like playing the stock market. You’ll want to monitor it and make constant tweaks and adjustments.