One term that redundantly occurs in the blogosphere’s SEO industry is – Keyword. No wonder though. Keyword is indeed an important facet in blogging. The choice and deployment of keywords, to a large extent determines the success or failure of your blog. This is the reason why many are making heaps of money from keyword research these days. Keyword research is slightly complicated for new bloggers and it is understood if you opt to hire someone for the job. But if you are going to look out for someone to place the keywords in your blog, then stop here. It is quite easy to figure out yourself where a keyword must fit within your blog. All you need to be aware of is, what all and where all the search-bots crawl.
Earlier, keyword placement just meant putting the primary and secondary keywords anywhere and everywhere within the blog and blog posts with the ultimate goal to increase the volume of the keyword in the blog. But, this is not the scenario anymore. Doing something like this would simply make you seem like a spammer. Search engines have got smarter and are able to distinguish well between genuine content and spam. So avoid using the age old SEO tactics and read on, to find out how to, and where to put keywords in your blog, in order to optimize it for the search engines the right way.
Titles
The titles are the first things the search engines crawl. By titles, I mean the blog’s title and its pages and posts titles. So keep them straight forward yet compelling to increase your click through rate on the SERP. The titles also most probably get used as the text by people who recommend or link to your blog or blog post. That means they may serve as the anchor text which is vital in your blog’s off page SEO.
Post Body
You should keep writing your post body with your targeted keyword and while doing this you should ensure that not to stuff with keywords nor diluting it. You can use keyword density checker tools to ensure the correct keyword density to allow search crawlers access your whole content.
Images
Unlike the early days of blogging, images provide high value in terms of SEO today. Even though image search accounts to a minor share, it is not negligible. Considering the competition, every little chance is important in SEO right?
Three different ways you can implement your keywords in images are:
- Using the keyword as the file name of the image before uploading to your host.
- Placing the keyword within the alt tag of the image. Restrict the alt tag to less than 5 words.
- Ensuring that the text that wraps the image in your post has related keywords or its synonyms.
URLs
When you Google for a keyword and keen observe the results, you can make out that the search engine places the webpages that have the searched keyword in the URL that appears at the end of each result.
Taking this into consideration, many blogging CMS/platforms have come up with something called ‘Permalink’ (permanent link) which is the URL we can define for the particular page or blog post. Make use of this feature to modify your URL in such a way that they contain the keyword or its synonym. Keep the keyword short (less than 5 words) and meaningful (avoid using date of posting) not only for the search robots but also for humans.
About the author:
Tim Wilson works as content manager for HostPapa, a web hosting Canada company serving over 100,000 customers. Since launching in 2006, HostPapa has offered reliable, budget-friendly, easy-to-use Canadian web hosting solutions for small to medium-sized businesses.
