Use of keywords on your blog can help search engines find your blog and understand what it’s about; for the new blogger, this is called keyword optimization.  You can use Keywords in a number of places: your blog name, meta tags, meta description, your article headline, subheaders within your post and words in your post.

But be careful!  Don’t use so many keywords that it looks unnatural to your readers.  You don’t want your post to be written only for search engines, you want it to read well for your readers, too.  Keywords should be woven in as seamlessly as possible.  It may be difficult at first, but with practice you’ll get the hang of it.

What are keywords?

Keywords are words or phrases that you anticipate searchers would use to find your topic or product.  They describe what your site or post is about, and help search engines find your post.  Then, when someone types that word into a search engine, your site will appear somewhere in the results.

How to Rank Better With Keywords

You’ll rank better if you use keyword phrases.  Try using keywords that have less competition.  You can use Google’s keyword tool to search for different words and phrases and see how competitive they are.  Try to aim for phrases that are less competitive so that you can get ranked higher for those words and thus attract more visitors.

Mix it Up

When you’re writing your blog about, let’s say, a new baked ziti recipe, you might want to use “baked ziti” as your keyword.  Forget it – that’s probably way too competitive.  Even adding “recipe” on the end is still really competitive.  So what would you do?  You can try “easy baked ziti,” which is less competitive but still gets a lot of searches.  You can also try mixing it up, and instead of “baked ziti recipe,” try “recipe for baked ziti”, it’s much less competitive.  Just play around with Google’s keyword tool and also try flipping phrases around.  A thesaurus helps too!  Look up synonyms to see if they are less competitive.

Use Focused Phrases

The longer and more focused your phrase is, the higher chance you’ll convert the reader into using your site.  The longer someone has been searching for something, the more focused his search phrases will be.  And the more serious he is about finding and buying something.  So you should try to use a phrase (at least two words) because the visitor you want to attract to your website is also probably using a longer phrase.

Don’t Overload Your Site

Using keywords in your head and subheaders help the spider crawling your page understand what it is about, but doesn’t look like you were trying too hard to get picked up in a search engine.  Remember moderation is key and you want to look natural.  Be careful not to litter your blog with keywords, as this can have a negative effects and might make your blog appear spammy.

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Remember, don’t over stuff your post, your title, or your meta tags with too many keywords.  Make sure that if you use a meta description it makes sense for people to read.  Here is a good link for how to use keywords in your titles.

And of course, as usual, don’t rely on just keywords!  Keyword optimizing is only part of good search engine optimization.  You will pick up more traffic with a good layout, good content, and backlinks.

For more tips, stay tuned!  The next post will be more Getting Started tips for how to make money with your blog!