Keywords in Blogging

A blog can do good things for a business:

• improve search results
• increase traffic, including repeat traffic
• provide a service to your customers

When you’re working to increase visibility, you’ll want to include your essential keywords in your blog copy. Obviously, if this is your primary focus, you’ll be sacrificing both the benefits of having customers come back to read your blog, and of providing a service to your customers.

So how can you include your keywords in your blog posts without compromising on value to your visitors?

• Make sure you’ve got the right keywords. A new client is setting up a blog. They’re a whole foods store, so it makes sense for them to use keywords like “whole foods,” “natural foods,” and “organic.” These terms are very likely to turn up in their blog posts, too — “Fitting Whole Foods into Your Budget,” and “Is Organic Better?” would be very sensible and useful blog posts for them. “Cheap supplements” isn’t a natural keyword for them, so they probably won’t use it naturally in their blog. The best plan is not to go ahead and stuff “cheap supplements” into the blog in an unnatural way, but to leave “cheap supplements” off their list of keywords.
• Use your keywords consistently. You always have a choice of words. Another new client is a spine rehab center. A primary reason people search for spine rehab centers is for pain relief, and they usually use the word “pain.” When I blog for this company, I could use “discomfort,” “distress,” or “soreness,” but in fact I’ll be using “pain.” In the privacy of their computers, people in need of spine stabilization don’t type “discomfort” into the search engines’ search boxes. Using the same word instead of a variety of words won’t make the blog posts less informative for visitors, and it will increase the chances that those back pain sufferers will find my client.
• Spotlight those keywords. The search engines will, if you do a good job, be able to see what your post is about and offer it to the people who will find it most valuable. But you can make it easy on the robots by using keywords in the title, in anchor text, and in tags and headings. If you blog regularly, you won’t need any special tricks, but a new blog can get a little jumpstart by pointing out to the search engines just what is most important.

In order to use this advice in a practical way, you need to know what your best keywords are. Here are some previous posts that might be beneficial:

• “Choosing Your Keywords”
• “Another Way to Look at Keywords”
• “Keywords, Marketing, and Your Brain”