Here is a guy who looks like he’s got his keywords straight. Now he has to use them the right way to get the right results.
One way to use keywords is in building the website. Websites with URLs that use keywords do better in search engines than those that don’t. For instance, if your keyword is “buy books” then a website with that in the URL (for instance 2buybooks.com) should theoretically do better than a website named Amazon.com. I used that as a trick example to show you that while a lot of this stuff is true in theory, you can market yourself to exceptional status. Amazon has been around so long and done so much marketing that it’s now in a class by itself. But for newer smaller sites without a lot of marketing budget, a keyword in the URL is a good idea.
This is not always possible, but it’s not a bad idea. You should also work keywords into meta tags (for people who build sites, it’s kind of behind-the-scenes descriptors) and in titles on your site.
Now whether this is your own site or you’re the writer-for-hire, you are going to want to write articles that use keywords. You see lots of jobs posted on Elance for “keyword rich” articles. Here are some pointers for writing the keyword-rich article.
- Do one keyword per article. If you have a list of 8 keywords, don’t use them all in one article. One keyword per article is the neatest.
- Put the keyword in the title. The title doesn’t have to be just the keyword, but it should include the keyword exactly as the keyword appears. If your keyword is “defibulator,” a mispelling of defibrillator, you can write a cool article called, “Stop Pronouncing It Defibulator.” If your keywords are “drinking olive oil” you could title the article, “Is drinking olive oil good for you?” The reason you want the keyword in the title is that titles are given a lot of weight by search engines and may even appear in your list of articles. In other words, you get a lot of mileage out of the title. Don’t write an article without some keywords.
- Now you want to write as great an article as you can, but you want to be sure to use the keyword in it in several places. This is called “keyword density” and it’s a bit of a controversial topic. Some people feel that you need a certain keyword density, that is, you need to use the keyword a few times. On the other hand, these same people would argue, you should not overuse the keyword because that would be unnatural. For instance, if you wrote 500 words on olive oil, it would probably be unnatural if the phrase “olive oil” appeared 200 times.
- Your article should relate to the keyword. This is something I rarely see mentioned, but it is terribly important. The search engines have fancy algorithms and methods to see if related words are used in the article to make sure that you’re not just spamming some blahty-blahty-blah together and tossing in a few keywords. You could try to figure out how to do this or you could just write a related article. I do the latter.
Most sites are built with a keyword per page; of course, you can have many pages with the same keyword. But if you opt for a new keyword–for instance, “California olive oil”–then give it its own page. If you’re only writing articles, your webmaster will know to do this.
The next step is testing. Once the sites are up and running, the webmaster should see how well they rank for certain keywords. Business is also a good barometer. And from there, keywords can be adjusted.
That’s it, that’s what I can tell you right now about the art and science of keywordsmithing. You need to know about this, even if you don’t have a website or write much on the Internet, because it’s increasingly important in our world of “omnimedia” where even articles intended for print eventually wind up on the web.
