Ok, so you have done the groundwork for writing your posts:

• You are writing one post per keyword
• You have the correct keyword density in your post, while making sure that you haven’t stuffed the post with the keyword
• You have used the keyword at all the right places in the post
• You also have the keyword in the title tag of the post

(Please note that when I say “keyword”, it doesn’t necessarily have to be one word. It can be a group of words that you have chosen as your keyword. In fact, it is better to select a group of words as your keyword)

Should you be doing something else before you hit the “publish” button?

Yes! Read on.

Use heading tags, and have keywords in them

HTML has something called the “heading tags” which are used to indicate that a piect of text is a heading.

Search engines pay more attention to the text within these heading tags compared to rest of the blog post text – after all, headings give a summary of the content that follows.

So, use the heading tags liberally in your posts.

There are six levels of headings in HTML – H1 to H6. Here, H1 is the most important (and has the largest font size), and H6 is the smallest (and has the smallest font size).

Usually, the H1 tags are used by your theme for post titles – which is very good for SEO because the post title anyway contains the keywords.

You need to use the other heading tags – H2 through H6 – for your headings and subheadings – and make sure that you have keywords in these headings.

This way, the search engines would pay even more attention to the keywords, helping you in your SEO efforts.

Highlight – Bold, Italics, Underline

Another thing that is often ignored is using different types of text decorations for keywords – like making them bold, italicized or underlining them.

This gives emphasis to the keywords, and makes them more important for the search engine spiders.

Also, it makes your text more readable (user friendly) for the visitors, and they get a better user experience – again, something that modern search engines like Google simply love!

But please ensure that you don’t overdo it – too much bold or italicized text means your text would be difficult to read, and it would result in negative SEO!

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It is important to have the right keyword density, and it is important to not stuff your post with keywords.

Is there anything more to keywords? Do you need to consider anything else?

Well, yes!

Keyword placement

Its not just the number of times a keyword is used in a post – where you put your keywords plays a role in SEO too.

Where you put the keywords in your blog post or webpage is called keyword placement.

Where should the keywords be?

Search engines like Google give a lot of importance to the beginning and the end of any post.

Therefore, you should definitely have the keywords appear in the first and the last paragraph of your blog post. It would be even better if you can have them appear in the first and the last sentence of the post.

This is the most important keyword placement tip for great SEO.

Apart from this, the blog post can have the keywords naturally scattered throughout the post – of course, making sure that the keyword density is right, and that you don’t stuff keywords in the post.

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External links and internal links are very important from an SEO point of view.

These links make Google and other search engine spiders visit your blog, and thus, help your blog get indexed.

Apart from this, the links are treated as a vote of confidence from the linking blog or website, and your ranking in the search engine result pages (SERPs) gets a boost due to this.

…but make them work harder

Yes, links do the job. But they can do a lot more than that!

Simply having links point to your blog or blog posts is enough in itself. But if you use the most appropriate words in the anchor text of your links, the links would become a lot more valuable!

Search engines like Google not only look at the number of links to your blog, but also at the anchor text of the link. To use our “vote” analogy, it means that Google treats a link as a vote for your blog for the words used in the anchor text.

That is, Google thinks that the linking website or blog finds your blog relevant for the words found in the anchor text. And if the linking site finds your blog relevant, searchers would too, right?

And that’s why Google ranks your blog higher for these terms!

Use keywords in the link’s Anchor Text

What words do you think are the most relevant for your blog? Your keywords!!

And your goal is to make Google and other search engines believe that your blog is the most relevant blog or site for your keywords.

Therefore, make sure that you use your keywords in the anchor text of your links – it is a sure shot way of improving your search engine ranking for your chosen keywords!

Backlinks and Internal Links

Getting your keywords in backlinks from other blogs and websites is more difficult – after all, some other webmaster controls these backlinks, and you might not have the liberty to specify the anchor text!

So, start with using keywords in your blog’s internal links – it is easy, and can be done immediately!

What is “Anchor Text”?

For those who are new to link building, anchor text is the text that you click in a hyperlink.

Thus, “Blog SEO Expert – SEO for Blogs” is the anchor text in the following link:

Blog SEO Expert – SEO for Blogs

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It is very important to have your keyword in the “title” tag of your pages. This is one element the search engine spiders pay most attention to in you blog post.

(Read all about this in “Keywords in the title tag – a must for good SEO“)

SEO Title Tag Plugin for WordPress (WP)

By default, WordPress has your post title as the meta title as well.

But most of the times, you would want to have the meta title different from the post title – for example, you may want to include variations of the keyword in the title.

The SEO Title Tag plugin for WP helps you do exactly that. Not just this, it even allows you to change the post slug (the URL of the blog post) so that you can include keywords in it!

Important Features of the “SEO Title Tag” plugin 

• You can define custom titles for:
  • A post
  • A page
  • Categories
  • Tags
  • Any URL that you specify – like an author archive or a date based archive
• You can set custom slugs for:
  • A post
  • A page
• The plugin automatically puts your blog’s name at the end of the title (instead of the beginning), so that the most important keywords are visible first
• You can specify the custom post title in the “New Post” or “Edit Post” admin pages
• You can define custom title for 404 error pages as well
• There is a facility for mass editing of titles and slugs

Screenshots

(Screenshots from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-title-tag/screenshots/ - please check it out for more screenshots)

Conclusion

The SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress can really help boost your SEO efforts – use it!

Relevant Links

SEO Title Tag Plugin Homepage

SEO Title Tag Plugin Page on WordPress.org

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One such place is the post’s Title meta tag.

What is the “title” meta tag?

A meta tag is an HTML element that is present in the <head> section of your post’s HTML code.

(Although the title tag is not technically a meta tag – like the keywords meta tag and the description meta tag – it is a meta tag for all practical purposes since it appears in the head section along with the meta tags).

A meta tag contains information about a webpage, and as you would have guessed, the title meta tag has the information about the page’s title.

Basically, the title meta tag tells the search engine spiders what the title of the webpage is. This is the hyperlinked text that is displayed in search result pages (SERPs) of search engines like Google.

Difference between title meta tag and post title

Do not mistake the title meta tag with the post’s title – these are two different things (although they can be, and usually are, the same by default).

The title of the post is something that is visible as the post title to readers on your blog. On the other hand, the title meta tag is the text that is displayed in the title bar (the top blue bar of a window) of the browser.

Importance of having keywords in the “title” meta tag

So why is the title meta tag important? Because it is the element of a webpage that search engines pay the most attention to.

Yes, the title tag is the most important element of any webpage in terms of SEO – and therefore, it makes tremendous sense to have your keyword appear in it.

Also, since this is the hyperlinked text displayed to the users in search engine result pages (SERPs), it helps to have the keywords there – after all, it would be more tempting to the searchers to click the link and come to your blog if that link contains the keywords they are searching for.

How to put keywords in the title tag?

In most blogging software, by default, the title of your blog post becomes the title of the webpage as well. So, if you have your keywords in the title of your post, the title tag would automatically have the keywords.

However, there might be times when you would want to keep the post title different from the title tag. There are many tools and plugins available for this – more on it in another post!

(Update: Read a review of a great plugin for customizing title tags – “Review of WordPress (WP) Plugin – SEO Title Tag“)

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Having the right keyword density is very important for successful SEO. The optimal keyword density is between 3% and 5%.

This density gives the best visibility to your keywords in the post in the eyes of the search engines, and thus gives you the best ranking in the search engine results page (SERPs).

What is Keyword Stuffing?

Keyword stuffing means having the keyword occur too many times in a post or webpage.

For example, if the keyword density is 20%, it is treated as being too much – naturally written text would never have any word (or group of words) repeating so many times.

So, it becomes obvious that the text of the post has been written (or manipulated!) with SEO in mind.

Why should you avoid keyword stuffing for good SEO?

When keyword stuffing is done, it seems rather unnatural to the search engine spiders, and this has a negative impact on your SEO – in fact, your post would be penalized by the search engines for keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing would also make the text of your post hard to read – it would not be reader friendly. And search engines only reward good writing.

Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO technique – meaning that it is implemented specifically to fool the search engine spiders or bots.

This used to work in the past, but today’s search engines like Google are very, very intelligent. They can detect such techniques very easily, and would end up penalizing your post for this.

In fact, if excessive keyword stuffing is detected, Google can even throw your blog out of its index altogether. Now that is not something we would ever want!

Bottomline

Keyword stuffing doesn’t work. Period. In fact, it harms your SEO efforts.

Stay away from it!

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And now you want to finally start writing your posts!

What is keyword density?

The question that you face is – how to incorporate the keyword? This is where keyword density comes into play.

(Please note – when I say “keyword”, it doesn’t have to be just one word. It can be a group of words that you have chosen as your keyword. In fact, it might be better to select multiple words as your keyword)

Keyword density is the number of times the keyword appears in proportion to the total number of words in the post. It is expressed as a percentage (%).

Mathematically speaking,

Keyword density = (Number of times the keyword appears in the post / total number of words in the post) * 100

For example, if you have a keyword appear 11 times in a post having a total of 300 words,

Keyword density = (11 / 300) * 100 = 3.67%.

How much should the keyword density be?

People disagree on this, and there are figures out there that are anywhere between 1% and 10%.

Personally, I have observed that a keyword density between 3% and 5% gives the best SEO results.

Your experience

What do you think – what is the best keyword density? What has been your experience? What has worked for you?

Do let me know through your comments.

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Ok, so you have chosen the keywords that are relevant for your blog. How do you proceed with writing your content?

You have three options:

1. Write a big, long post or page that contains information about everything you want to talk about, and have all the keywords in it
2. Write multiple, medium-sized posts and include 3-4 keywords in each
3. Write a separate post for each keyword

Which option is the best?

The search engine spiders evaluate a webpage, and see the relative density of words to find the keywords relevant to that page or post.

What happens when you choose option 1 or 2? Your posts have many keywords – which means that no particular word would stand out for that post.

That is, the words that you wanted to highlight as your keywords to the search engines get obscured among all the other words on that webpage.

That is not something that we want for good SEO!

To each his own – One post, one keyword

This leaves us with option 2 – Writing a separate post for each keyword – as the best option.

(Please note that when I say “one keyword”, it doesn’t necessarily have to be one word. It can be a group of words that you have chosen as your keyword. In fact, it is better to select a group of words as your keyword)

When you target each post at only one keyword, you are better able to highlight that keyword in the post. Your posts are focused, and therefore, the search engines can immediately link the post with your keyword. And this results in better position in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

The user benefits too

And remember, this is not good just from the SEO point of view – when your posts focus on one keyword each, it also means that the content is much more relevant for that keyword.

So, the readers coming to that page get crisp, targeted content. Which, in turn, results in even higher search engine ranking! (Remember, search engines love good content).

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Why do you take up SEO for your blog? To attract visitors to your blog through search engines.

And how do you attract these people? You do that by optimizing your posts or pages for particular words that are relevant for your topic.

What are Keywords?

These words that represent the topic you write about – and for which you want to attract visitors to your blog are called Keywords.

Importance of choosing the right keywords

It is really important to choose the right keywords for your blog’s SEO efforts. After all, these are the words that people would be coming to your blog for.

So, what should be considered while selecting the keywords?

1. Relevance

The words have to be relevant to the topic that you write about. This is a must – search engines don’t just look at individual words, but also at the overall topic of the blog.

If the keywords do not match the topic, you would never rank high in search engine result pages (SERPs) for these keywords.

2. Competition

There are some generic keywords for which there are many, many searches conducted. This means that there is very high interest in topics related to such keywords.

For example, there are approximately 4.1 million searches conducted for the keyword “SEO”.

This also means that many people want to draw traffic for these keywords, and therefore, there is very heave competition for optimizing blogs and websites for these keywords!

So, try to look for keywords that do not have too much competition when it comes to optimization – which means that as keywords, you should use keywords for which there is moderate (not too low, but not too high either) amount of traffic.

Tip: A great tool to find demand for different keywords is Google’s “Keyword Tool”. This tool tells you demand for the keywords that you enter – and you get to know this information from the horse’s mouth!

This tool can be found at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

3. Long tail

Try to look for multiple words as keywords. For example, try to optimize for “earning online through blogs” instead of “earning online”.

This way, you would be targeting keywords that have less competition (the point we discussed above). At the same time, you would be targeting people who are interested in your specific topic instead of a more general topic.

(After all, if you are writing about earning online using blogs, what is the point in trying to attract visitors looking for earning online using all possible means?)

4. Include geographic indicators

Another factor to consider while choosing your keywords is geographic indicators – this can be the name of a country, state or even a city.

This is very effective if you are targeting people from a specific region. For example, if you are a WordPress consultant in New York, it makes sense to target “WordPress blogging new york” instead of just “WordPress blogging”.

It also has the same effect as discussed above – you target keywords are less competitive, and you target people who are more relevant to you.

Conclusion

Keep these factors in mind while choosing your keywords, and start building great content for your journey towards a perfectly optimized blog!

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There is loads and loads of data on the internet. There are millions of websites and blogs containing a lot of information.

Some of this information is very good, some is average, and most is simply bad. How does an internet user reach the information that is really good?

Enter search engines like Google! A search engine spiders and indexes the entire internet (at least, it tries to!), and classifies the information as good, average or bad for various keywords.

Their primary aim is to provide the best and most relevant information to the search engine user.

What is the goal of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts?

Well, it is obvious: Using SEO on your blog, you want to attract more traffic to it. More visitors result into more dedicated readers, and it means more revenue, or more visibility, or more of whatever you are trying to achieve through your blog!

And through SEO, you want to make your blog more attractive to the search engines.

Congruence of the goals

What can make your blog most attractive to a search engine like Google? Helping them meet their primary objective of providing best content!

Search engines are primarily looking for good and relevant content, and the best way to become attractive to a search engine’s eye (and therefore, to rank higher) is to provide great content!

Isn’t it simple enough – A search engine is looking for the best content, and you provide the best content. Therefore, you are at the top in the search engine results page (SERP).

The bottom-line: SEO can not be a substitute for good content. Great SEO starts with great content.

A point to ponder: As a blog author, shouldn’t “providing the best content” be your primary goal too?

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