20 Apr Your Keywords & How to Use Them
Your keywords are the logical place to start. We’re assuming you already have a WordPress blog and you are writing about something you are passionate about, or at least interested in (otherwise, why are you doing it?.
Now, here’s where you’ll start to notice the difference between more standard SEO techniques and my more natural approach to SEO for WordPress.
What we’re going to do is use just the one keyword. We’re not targeting 5 or 10, we just need the one and it needs to be the very best keyword to describe the subject of your article/post in as few words as possible. So, for instance, my keyword for this post would be ‘SEO for WordPress’. It’s short, to-the-point and describes my post without having to go into too much further detail before you get the idea.
It’s very important that your keyword is totally relevant to your content so please spend some time getting this part right if you need to.
You’ll notice that I haven’t talked about keyword research yet. Well, that’s because we’re not going to use it … at all. *Cue the gasps of SEO experts everywhere*. Well, it’s not all that radical really and if you think about it, it’s not logical to let keyword research dictate the terminology you use in your article or post (don’t forget that we’re writing this article because we want to share it with the world, in its proper context).
I’m not suggesting that keyword research is out-dated and useless and we shouldn’t be using it. All I’m saying is that I find it can dilute the subject matter of your article and you can often find yourself writing about stuff you you don’t know too much about and you had no intention of writing about in the first place.
To build a site full of naturally written, original and compelling content will be the difference between success and failure and when writing content for your blog, keywords should be chosen and used just as organically.
You may even find yourself writing a complete post before it even occurred to you that you will need to select a target keyword. If that’s the case … BRILLIANT! You’ll probably find the right phrase has been repeated on numerous occasions throughout your copy and you can simply pluck out the right one. Personally I would love to be able to do that but for some reason, I prefer to have my phrase before I start writing.
So, by now you should have a clear idea of your target key phrase. The next natural step (for me) is to begin writing.
Writing neat, compelling and original content for your website is probably the most important skill for any web publisher. Let’s not forget that blogs allow us to interact with our visitors and our community, so we’re not just writing for the search engines any more. It’s not about how many keywords we can cram into a sentence. We need copy that will engage our visitors keep them coming back for more.