SEO Basics: Why Keywords Are Important

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SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” and it is the process of making your blog or website more search engine friendly. There are a variety of things that you can do to your site to help the search engines find it. This helps your site get a better ranking in search results.

For example, if you go to Google (or any other search engine) and you type in a phrase, the listings that come up are the search results. You want the search engines to list your site on one of the first few pages of results, because most people won’t look beyond the first three pages of results. The closer you are at the top, the better chance you have of someone clicking on your site.

Keywords are the foundation of SEO. You’ve probably heard people talk about keywords – and for good reason. You want to use keywords in the title of your blog post (if possible) as well as the text.

To get started, you need to find some keywords. Google provides a free keyword tool. It’s called (drum roll please….) the Google Keyword Tool.

Let’s say you are planning to write a post about caring for vintage clothes. You can type some phrases into the keyword tool to see what comes up. I just did that, and the term “washing vintage clothes” came up with high competition, which means a lot of people are using it. However, the term “washing vintage clothing,” came up with low competition.

You want to use a phrase that has a low amount of competition, because that means there aren’t as many competing websites out there, using the same phrase. You also want a phrase that has high search. This means that a lot of people are looking for it, but not many websites can be found on the topic.

In this case the phrase “Washing Vintage Clothing” will actually make a great blog post title. Sometimes, the phrases that come up in the keyword tool will be a little wonky. They may not be grammatically correct or they just won’t work for a blog post title for one reason or another. That’s okay – you can still try to fit the phrase into your blog post.

You can also use the keywords in your blog post tags, and in some cases the categories, as well. Don’t go overboard and create a new category for every keyword you use. Using keywords in your titles, throughout the post, and in the tags will be enough to help the search engines find you and start sending you traffic.

Have you used keywords in blog posts before?

By Crissy Herron, www.IndieBizChicks.com

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