SEO
is a lot more than sprinkling a few keywords throughout your text.
Google will certainly not appreciate it very much. Not only will you
fail to get your site ranked highly by it, but you also risk getting
penalized. Google updates like Panda and Penguin have put an end to
keyword stuffing and forced content marketers to adopt new SEO
strategies and work much harder.
However, contrary to what you may
read, keywords are still a very viable strategy when writing content.
You just have to be ready to put in more effort and be more subtle when
implementing them. To show you that keyword research and writing with
keywords in mind can still work for you, check out this great post on
SEMrush by Syed Irfan Ajmal. In the post he explains how he increased revenue by 23.85% in 6 months, just by implementing that very strategy.
In
addition to that, we are going to share some tips and tricks on how you
are supposed to target the right keywords and write posts around them
which your audience will find useful, and Google will rank very high.
Keep on reading to find out more.
1. Keyword Research
One
of the best tools which you can use when targeting the right keywords
for content creation is SEMrush. SEMrush is one of our favorites because
it enables us to take a peek at what our competitors are doing, which
we then use as a basis to improve our content. But, apart from that,
SEMrush is a real goldmine of information. If you haven’t done so
already, create an account and log in. Once you are logged in, type in
the URL you want to know more about. We are going to use Business.com as an example.
On
the left-hand side, you will be able to see the link named “Organic
Research.” After you click on it, you will be transferred to “Positions”
section of the website.
Even
at first glance, you will be able to find tons of information which
will give you a better insight into any website, including stuff like
keyword rankings, traffic, search volume, keyword difficulty, and
traffic cost.
It’s a good strategy to choose the keywords you
already rank for (first 50 positions) which have a search volume of 1000
or higher.
Let’s take a look at keywords with high traffic our example URL, Business.com can target.
This
is how you can get the best keywords for targeting, around which you
can build your content. Now it’s time to start writing.
2. Writing with Keywords in Mind
As
we have mentioned before, keyword stuffing is one of the most outdated
and frowned upon practices you can adopt when creating content around
keywords. Not only will Google rank your website lower, but posts and
articles which are stuffed to the brim keywords and phrases, often
meaningless or downright ridiculous, are also avoided by readers because
they are not able to find anything of value in those posts.
However,
that doesn’t mean you should give up inserting a few key phrases which
make complete sense, and which are bound to find themselves in an
article anyways. If your key phrase is “
digital photography Mexico,” it
sounds completely lame and unnatural. But, if you implement it more
organically and say “
digital photography in Mexico is more popular than
ever,” it sounds much better.
As
for keyword density, you need to be careful. If you are indeed writing
an article about digital photography, you don’t need to drop a keyword
like “digital photography” every 50 words or so. Readers already know
the article is about that particular subject, so reminding them of it
every 30 seconds is just blatant keyword stuffing. Aim for 1-3% keyword
density when inserting your keywords, while maintaining good readability
and value of your posts. Anything more than that and you will land
yourself in hot water with Google.
3. Writing Long Posts
We
are talking both long articles which are at least 1000 words long or
better yet, around 1500 words long, as well as in-depth pillar posts,
which are upwards of 2000 words. While it is not necessarily a rule,
longer articles tend to provide more value for the reader, more useful
data, because there is simply more room for the writer to get into the
matter.
On top of that, Google favors longer articles because they
have more material for its spiders to analyze and rank properly. So why
doesn’t everyone just write these massive posts? The answer is simple:
they are damn hard to write, and it will take you forever to complete
one.
Longer
articles allow you to get just about any natural combination of
relevant keywords into your article. On top of that, longer articles
will keep your readers for much longer on your website, and you will get
more comments, links and social media shares than you normally would,
by writing short posts.
Where
keyword placement does matter is at the beginning of the article, so be
sure to pepper your introduction with a few targeted keywords.
4. Short-Tail Keywords vs. Long-Tail Keywords
Both
short-tail and long-tail keywords have their share of supporters and
detractors. We say, why can’t you have both? In fact, you need both. In
case you are not familiar with the term, long-tail keywords are, well,
long phrases which are extremely specific, but which are more likely to
be used by readers which are close to purchasing something they need.
With
long-tail keywords, you are going to run into much less competition,
and you will experience short-term benefits because people who are
looking for those long-tail keywords will come straight to your website.
Short-tail
keywords, on the other hand, are much less specific and cast a much
wider net in terms of audience. With short-term keywords, however, you
are going to face a lot of competition, but as you produce quality
content and establish yourself as a reliable source of information,
those short-term keywords will start working in your favor.
You
just have to be patient and work hard at creating great content. Once
you have built your reputation, you will have people looking for general
terms, such as “
digital photography,” and clicking on your links,
because they will have made their way toward the first pages of Google
Search.
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