The Ultimate Guide To Using Keywords And Keyword Phrases In Your Site.

If you are a web publisher, you probably already know how important it is to use the right keywords and keyword phrases in order to be found by the target audience.

The use of keywords relevant to what your site is about is a simple but highly effective way to rank your site in the search engines. The search engine rankings really depend on how correlated your keywords are to the contents of your webpage and how well you use them.

What exactly are keywords?

Simply put, keywords are the informative words you choose to indicate what your site and the content of your site is about. They play a very important role to reflect your site’s focus and find targeted audience. Using keywords in a crafty yet efficient way lets your audience find your web pages in the internet and read your contents.

Keywords are also the words people (your target audience) use in the search box of the search engines. Therefore, they are the most important key in getting traffic to your site via search engines. As a matter of fact, they are the fundamental behind search engine optimization (SEO). They are especially important as your blog or website is being crawled, indexed and ranked by the search engines based on keywords.

Knowing your audience or customers and ways to reach them is the first step in any marketing strategy. If you are not using targeted keywords in your site, then your visitors are going to have a hard time finding your site. It would really be a waste of time, working so hard on a site for such a long time and not having targeted visitors. Wouldn’t you agree..?

If you are thinking of providing your business, skills, services, products or even information, you need to focus on getting targeted traffic to your site using targeted keywords.

How to find the right keywords for your site?

Keyword research is how you determine what keywords are being used by your target audience, in the search engine, to reach a site like yours. Brainstorming the keywords with the target audience in mind is the first step in finding the right keywords. This step is where you make a list of as many keywords or keyword phrases you possibly can that relates to your site and the target audience. Then choose about 15-20 keywords that are strictly focused on what your site is about. One of the best ways to get started is to ask yourself what words people might use to find what you offer. If you want to take it to the next level, keyword research tools like Google AdWords keyword tool or Wordtracker certainly comes in handy.

Here is a sample search of keyword phrase ‘create a website’ in a keyword research tool. Pay close attention to the Search number. This number determines how many times the sample keyword is being searched daily, monthly or yearly.

Using Wordtracker for your keyword research.

Analyzing the keywords is the next step where you find the aptitude of the keywords you picked by evaluating the saturation or the competition of the keywords. In other words, you need to find out how many other sites use the same keywords.

Instead of going on a wild goose chase, targeting specific keywords that are not very saturated but is in demand is the best way to get targeted visitors to your site. This is a simple step where you search the keyword in the search engine and find out the competition number on the keywords you picked.

For instance, when the same keyword phrase ‘create a website’ is searched on search engines like Google, you can easily find out the Competition Number.

Looking for competition number in search engines.

After evaluating the search number and the competition number, you can find the effective keywords for your site. Keywords with less competition but high search rate are the ones you want to include in your site. Search engines are going to rank your site based on these keywords quicker as there is less competition.

Of course, this does not mean that you should not include other keywords in your site but more effective keywords you use, the better is your chance of being found by your target audience. It is wise not to limit your keywords just based on the information your provide. Also include keywords relating to the products and services you offer.

So, How do you use the keywords you picked?

First of all, before you get into using keywords in your article, make sure to construct your article with your audience in mind and not the search engines. Remember your audience come before the search engines. Many webmasters try to please the search engines and don’t care much about the audience. This is a recipe for disaster.

The keywords you picked need to be used throughout your web page efficiently to get the maximum results. Here are some tips on how to use keywords effecitvely in your site:

• You need to use the keywords you picked in the title tags, headline, meta description and html tags. ( You don’t necessarily need to use it in Meta keywords as search engines nowadays do not index anything used in this tag. )
• Use the most valuable keyword in the URL ( Permalinks – if you use content management platform WordPress ) and optimize it by keeping the URL short and attractive.
• Use it in the title and on the first paragraph of your page, especially in the beginning.
• Don’t target too many keywords for one page/post. Use different keywords for different posts as optimizing same keywords for number of posts is just a waste of time.
• Use related keywords relevant to your article to get an extra advantage in S.E.O ( For instance, if your article is about making money online, using related keywords like make money online, make a living online, make money on the internet,.. gives you an edge in optimization. )
• Repetition of the keywords in the content is very important. So, keep the keyword in mind while writing articles. However, be careful of using too many keywords in your title, tags or content. Also referred as keyword stuffing, this is considered as spam and will have a negative impact on your site.
• Use the keywords as an anchor text to link to relevant posts and use text formatting (bold) on the keywords. Remember not to overdo this as it might not be visually pleasing to your audience.

In conclusion,

It is very important to remember that you need to write your articles with your audience in mind not the search engines. Using the right keywords in a right density, not keyword stuffing, is important in search engine optimization.

How do you use your keywords and keyword phrases to optimize your site?

Please feel free to comment down below and add to the above conversation. Plus, if you like this article Tweet it, share it in Facebook or your favorite social media outlets.

Here’s to your successful online endeavor!

-Adam Paudyal.

Before you go... Subscribe to our Newsletter to get timely tips and advice for your successful online endeavor! Subscribe to the RSS feed to read the blog posts in the feed reader! Follow me on Twitter Connect with me in Facebook