4 Ways You Can Improve Your Keywords & See a Big Surge of Traffic

By: | November 8, 2016 | Tags: , , , , , |

Improve your keywords with these 4 tips #SEO4 Ways to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO

By Janet Anthony

Sure, social media is a useful way to get your blog in front of people. At the same time, it takes constant work and constant updating in order to keep up a flow of traffic – and getting your posts in front of new people can be a lot of hard work.

If you rank highly enough in the search algorithms that people actually find your site (harder than you may think, as only 5% of people actually get past the first page of search results) you’ll get a constant flow of people to your website, all of them are new, and all of them are looking for something.

Now doesn’t that sound excellent?

Of course, getting there takes a bit of work. Just like turning yourself into a superhero blogger isn’t something that just happens, you’re going to have to work at ranking well in terms of SEO. You’ve got to take the right steps. Today we’re going to explore what those are.

Do your research

Make certain that you actually find out what keywords do well and aim for those. There are numerous tools available online (just search for ‘keyword explorer’ or something similar) that you can use a couple of times a day for free. If you use all of them, you can actually get a pretty good idea what phrases you should go for.

Why should you go through this effort? That’s because some phrases get searched for more often than others, while other phrases have far more competition than others. You want to find that sweet spot where competition is low, but the number of searches aims at those words or that phrase are high.

If you’re just starting out, be sure to aim at the low competition, as you’ll actually be able to rank decently there. Sure, a trickle of traffic isn’t great, but it’s better than not getting any traffic at all!

(Host blogger’s commentary: Instructions for finding low competition are in the Google Keyword Planner tutorial.)

Aim at long-tail keywords

If you’re just starting out, then don’t immediately aim for the obvious keywords. Chances are pretty good that those are incredibly hard to break into, as there is a lot of competition for them. Instead, aim at long-tail keywords.

What are long-tail keywords?  These are phrases containing several words. They might be a question like “how do I get to Timbuktu?”, or a precise search term like “gear shifts for V6 engines.” The point of this is that yes, people will obviously search for them less, but those people who do search for them know exactly what they’re looking for.

That means that if your page fulfills that need, they’re more likely to stick around, reducing your bounce rate (or how many people leave your page without clicking on) and that search engines will rank you better.

What’s more, if you’re selling something, then you’re far more likely to actually sell something at this stage, as the people have moved on from their initial search stage and now know what they want, meaning they’re far closer to buying what you’re selling.

Include the keywords in your post

In fact, you don’t just want to include them in your post, you want to – if possible – include them in your title. Most search engines pay far more attention to your title than they do the body of your text. And that is quite logical, as that is obviously what users are going to pay more attention to as well.

Also, if possible, make certain to include them in your subheadings as well, as these again are considered more important by search engines than the main body of your text.

Don’t keyword stuff. What’s that? That’s when you put your keywords in as many times as possible. In years gone by that was a good way to get search engines to rank you more highly. Nowadays, however, you get punished for that, as it’s considered unnatural.

So put it in a couple of times, but don’t overdo it.

Found great keywords? Make sure your content rocks

Sometimes you just rattle off a page and post it. That’s great for a great deal of your content. Those times, however, when you find a really great keyword, you shouldn’t do that. Instead, make sure that post really rocks. Be sure to avoid the common mistakes in writing, and also don’t just write it in one day, but come back to it again with a fresh mind a few days later.

You see, it is far more useful to write some outstanding content sometimes and decent content the rest of the time, then to write pretty good content all of the time. Why? Because outstanding content will get shared far more often and that is something that is also vital for SEO, as search engines now look at how often your content gets shared, as well as how often it gets back-linked to.

So take your time on a really great idea. Do the research, write the right content, perhaps even get somebody else to look at it. Because unless you’ve got a massive following, you won’t be able to get all of your articles ranking highly for SEO.

Instead, you should focus on making sure that some (or even one) do.

About the Author: Janet Anthony is a blogger from Kansas City who has been writing professionally for five years now. She mostly writes about blogging, social media, and SEO. Her motto is “What you do today can improve all your tomorrows”. Find Janet here: Twitter. You can read her article Avoid the common mistakes in writing.

Host Blogger’s Commentary:

Readers, please share this post. Many bloggers and website creators find SEO confusing. Janet explained how to improve your search engine rankings so you can increase your organic traffic in understandable terms.

How do you improve your search engine traffic? Is it a goal of yours? What is your favorite keyword tool? I look forward to your views in the comments section.

Related Posts:

5 SEO Tips To Double Your Blog Traffic in the New Year

How to Increase Your Blog Traffic Using Google Analytics

2 Things About SEO You Need to Know To Get Traffic

2 Things About SEO You Need to Know To Get Traffic Part II

How to Boost Your Traffic: The Complete Beginner’s Guide to SEO

5 Top WordPress SEO Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

  1. Donna DeGuglielmo

    your so good Janice, thank u bunches… i have to say i love twitter more than FB. you go girl always love you and your colleagues here post and info… blessings donna marie

    • Janice Wald

      Hi Donna,
      Please accept my apology. I fell behind answering comments when my book was published. I am catching up on replying to comments now. Thank you so much for writing about my guest author’s SEO post. In response to what you wrote: Happily, I just checked this morning and saw my Twitter traffic is increasing.
      Happy Thanksgiving.
      Janice

  2. Mark

    Thanks for sharing some outstanding advice Janet!

    Too bad you still see far too many online newbie marketers,
    still attempting to use the old school method of keyword
    stuffing!

    Either that, or they don’t even bother to learn basic keyword research
    at all! Thanks for sharing some extremely practical advice!

    • Janice Wald

      Hi Mark,
      I have a post in the works about keyword tools. If I use your comments, I will link to you. Thanks for coming by today.
      Janice

  3. Julie Syl Kalungi

    Very good basic steps to SEO and Ranking one’s posts. Always serving the blogosphere Janice. Keep up the good work!

    • Janice Wald

      Thanks for coming by today, Julie. I appreciate the compliments.
      Janice

    • Janice Wald

      Hi Emmanuel,
      You sent me the questions on Facebook, but at work social media is blocked. I will paste them to Google Docs and then invite you to share the doc via your Email address. When do you need it by?
      Janice

  4. Victoria

    I’ve been going back and updating old posts and many of my very first posts had one generic word as the keyword! If I only I had known about long tail keywords when I started. The things we learn the longer we blog! Visiting from Saturday Sharefest.

    • Janice Wald

      Hi Victoria,
      Please forgive my delay in response. I am usually not rude. I fell behind on answering comments when my book was published. I am planning a post on long-tail keywords. If I use your comments, I will link to you. Thanks for clicking my link over at SITS.
      Janice

  5. Shamsudeen Adeshokan

    Hi Janice,

    Informative – effective keyword research is the foundation to a successful marketing. If you get your keywords right, you simply attract the right audience to your offer.

    I found keyword.io a very useful keyword discovery tool you might possibly not find in Google AdWord.

    Thanks for sharing, nice share.

    • Janice Wald

      Hi,
      I appreciate you writing me I use Keyword.io and I agree it is useful, especially for finding long-tail keywords. I plan on blogging about SEO tools soon.
      Janice

  6. Dolly

    Thank you for very valuable tips. I am glad you stopped by my blog, and now I found you.

    • Janice Wald

      My pleasure Dolly. Thanks for returning the blog love and visiting me. Any friend of Lisa’s is a friend of mine. I am glad you enjoyed my guest author’s SEO post. Come by anytime. I would love to have your readership.
      Janice

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