SEO Part 4 - Keywords

I spoke a little about the importance of keywords in part 2 but now I'm going to delve a bit deeper into the world of keywords.

Keywords are the most important aspect of SEO. Choosing the correct ones is imperative for high rankings and therefore more traffic. Your biggest hurdle will be deciding which keywords best describe your content while bringing you the most traffic.

Choosing Keywords

The key to good rankings is in your choice of keywords. One word keywords aren't a brilliant idea as competition is high. For example if your site is about budget beauty focusing on the keyword 'beauty' would be ill advised as competition for that keyword is extremely high. You'd be better off using the keywords 'budget beauty blog' as the amount of people referred to your site will be higher. It is best to aim for less competitive keywords as you'll appear higher in results. It is no use being ranked at 5000 for a particular keyword because no-one looks through 5000 results. When deciding on keywords use Google's Keyword Tool to find out how competitive certain search terms are. But remember don't choose keywords that aren't relevant to your content. But do look at how many searches per month a particular keyword/phrase is getting. After all if only 5 searches per month are performed for a certain phrase it is hardly worth your time optimising for it.

Density

Keyword density is very important. You need to make your content keyword rich to ensure it ranks well. Keyword density let's search engines measure how relevant a site is in relation to a keyboard. I recommend using the keywords 2-3 times within a post if the search term is a popular one or 1-2 times if it is a less common search term. But don't add too many keywords otherwise it will affect your writing in a negative way.

Keyword Location

The location of keywords is vital too. Keywords in titles, headings and the first paragraph of content matters more than keywords elsewhere. This is because these areas matter more to the search engines than ordinary text. It is also a good idea to have your keywords in your post or blog url. If you've not yet bought your own domain and are about to I'd suggest having a keyword or two that relate to your sites content in your domain address. As default Blogger post urls already contain post titles in the url structure so if your optimising your post titles with keywords then your url will be optimised too.

So that's it for part 4, stay tuned for part 5!