Choosing Good Keywords for SEO

Once you have completed your keyword analysis, you should choose one or two keywords/keyword phrases to optimize your post towards. These are the keywords that you want to rank well for and appear at the top of the search results when someone searches for them. You should still incorporate the rest of your keyword list into your post when appropriate.

Tips For Choosing Good Target Keywords

• Keywords should either have a high number of monthly searches, or have fewer monthly searches but low competition. It may be easy to rank well for keywords with low competition, but that is because not many people are searching for these keywords.  Use your judgement to determine if it is worthwhile to optimize for low competition keywords.

• Avoid optimizing for broad terms, even if they are highly searched.  Broad terms are usually high competition keywords that will make it hard to rank well, or you may attract irrelevant people to your page who are searching for something else.

• Optimize for highly targeted keywords, or a combination of low and high competition terms.  For example, the keyword seo blogger is not highly searched with relatively low competition, but the keyword seo is highly searched. Optimizing for seo blogger allows you to optimize for both keywords simultaneously.

• Keep in mind that the Google Keyword Tool measures advertising competition, which is probably a good indicator for content competition.  However, you can examine content competition by doing an exact search using quotation marks in Google’s search engine.  Are their many or relatively few exact matches?



Optimizing for Keywords

There are several practices that can make your keywords more visible to search engines.

• Always position your target keyword phrase(s) at the beginning of your post title. Don’t repeat your target keyword more than twice in your title, and keep your title between 40 to 70 characters including spaces.

• Include your target keyword phrase(s) frequently throughout the body text, but it is especially important to make sure the keyword appears recurrently near the top of the post.

• Search engines will check your post for keyword density – percentage indicating how often your keyword phrase appears on the page (no. keywords/no. total words * 100). Use your keywords as much as possible when appropriate, but if it seems like it’s appearing too much then search engines will pass over your page.  The recommendation is that your keyword should appear once every 100 words, but don’t get too hung up on analyzing the word count.

• Bold keywords

• Italicize keywords

• Put your keyword in bullets

• Write keywords in Title Case when appropriate (capitalize first letter of every word).

• Place keywords in heading tags (

  Keyword

  )