The internet is largely run by keywords. People are able to find what they are looking for at the click of a button by typing in a search phrase using keywords. The search engines are constantly improving their algorithms to make their search results more and more sophisticated. Articles that contain keyword-rich content will be a lot easier to find in a search than articles that have not been keyword optimized. Millions of businesses are using keyword-rich articles to obtain free traffic to their websites. No matter who you are, if you are trading online in any way, you can greatly benefit from keyword optimized articles and keyword-rich web content. The more keyword writing you do, the easier it will become, but that is not to say you cannot write a perfectly good web article that is keyword rich as a beginner. You need to use Keywords in all of your webpages, but especially the home page. Have you ever noticed those websites that have a fancy video on the home page with a Skip Intro button or Click to Enter? These sites may have been designed by the most talented web designers on the planet, but they know very little about internet marketing. The home page needs to have lots of relevant text containing the keywords that potential customers will type into a search box. I woud strongly advise you write your article or page without thinking about keywords at all. This is so that you include all the crucial points you want to make. If you think about keywords from the beginning, you may miss some of these vital points. If you are an expert on the subject you are writing about, you will automatically use the type of language or technical jargon that others in that field will use. If you don’t yet consider yourself an expert on the subject, find out how the experts do speak and use their language and buzz words. In order to do this, visit websites and forums where these guys hang out. It won’t take you long before you know what they are talking about. Before adding the keywords into your article or page, find out exactly which keywords you need to use. They are not always the ones you think. Start as you mean to go on, by researching properly which keywords are going to be the most effective. It’s not difficult at all, and will not take you long, but if you fail to carry out this step, you could end up throwing money away. To begin with, think of all the most obvious keywords and key phrases that you assume people are searching for. You might think there are not that many, but out of the ones you first think of, there will be one prominent single word that shows up in nearly all your key phrases. For preliminary research I always get that one word and put it into the free search box at: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ Of course you will need to put all your phrases into the box later, but for now just put the main single word in, because you will find that people are searching on keyphrases you never thought of that will still be relevant to your business. So lets say you sell dog beds. You might have an initial list of obvious keywords that look something like this:
Dog bed Notice how there are really only two key phrases, but when combined with plurals and the two extra words ‘small’ and ‘large’ we can turn the list into twelve.
When choosing an extensive list of
keywords to advertise on, you will want to find many keywords,
that might include the words: ‘Buy’, ‘Buying’ ‘Online’, town
and state names etc (When looking for "Dog" in Wordtracker,
although there were a lot of irrelevant keywords for our
business, we notice "Dog Supplies" that
we could also use). But for now, we are just
concentrating on including the most popular keywords in
articles and web content. When you did your keyword research at Wordtracker you were also given numbers. This relates to how many searches are done per day. This is approximate and is estimated to represent a third of all online searches. You may want to copy the results into an xls file for future reference. Which keywords had the most searches? These are probably the keywords you want in your title and heading. And the next most popular searches are the ones you will want in your subheadings. Also make sure that despite your whole page or article containing keywords, it is still easy to read and does not look false. You cannot sacrifice the quality of your article just to cram all your keywords in as many times as possible. Not only will the search engines penalize you for this, but your readers will also be unimpressed. The keywords in your page title, page description, heading and subheadings are more than likely going to be quite general keywords. But you also want to include more specific keyword phrases in your article as well. Your title or heading also needs to be more keyword-rich at the beginning, rather than at the end. Search Engines place most importance on the first word of a heading, second most importance on the second word etc. So the article heading; “Optimize Your Website with Keyword Rich Content” has our main keyword (in this case: “KEYWORD”) as the fifth word, so it would be better to use; “Keyword Rich Web Content” for the title and heading. Oh, we did! Another cheat is to drop the hyphen in “keyword-rich”, as this is seen as one word, though on blogs, use both hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions as tags, as both will be searched on. I have also used both within this article. If you are using the article for a blog post or on social networking sites, make sure you put all your keywords as tags. Tags play an important role in getting articles found online as they use keywords very effectively. Look at my blog posts at www.engineeryoursuccess.com/blog/ to see what tags I have used. So now you know how to use keywords in your articles and webpages, you have no excuse not to use them. The few minutes you spend finding out which keywords to include could end up getting you thousands more visitors to your site than if you didn't bother. Further keyword resources and tools can be found at GoodKeywords.com, Google's Keyword suggestion tool and Yahoo's Overture tool (only available to members of their PPC). For paid keyword tools I recommend Wordtracker's paid tool, Market Samurai, Keyword Elite and Nichbot.com.
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