Keywords

Keywords are essential to getting your blog(s) seen and ranked well by
the search engines. In a previous chapter of this eBook we talked
about writing keyword rich content, using your keywords in titles, and
using special formatting like bold to attract the Googlebot to your
topics. The reason for this is simply for search engine optimization.
You want to use your blog’s keywords often because this will help the
search engine better index your website for your keywords. Better
indexing is equal to a better ranking on the search engine results page
when someone searches for those keywords.


Suppose for a moment you have a blog about living in Podunk. The
more times you mention Podunk in your titles and posts, the more
Google and the other search engines understand your site is about
Podunk. This means that when someone goes to search for Podunk on
Google, your page will return with a higher position than other sites on
Podunk which uses that word less on their websites.


One of your main goals with search engine optimization is to have your
blog’s content have a lot of keywords contained within it. In other
words you need to make sure that within the words on your page, you
make sure that a lot of those words are keywords. This is commonly
referred to as “keyword density.”


Assume for a moment that you have a blog on laptops. You write an
article of about 500 words and you mention the word “laptop” 10 times
in the article. This would give you a key word density of 2%. That
means that 2% of your words in that article are “laptop.” If you
changed that same article to have the word “laptop” in your article 18
times, use a title of “The Best Laptop For Your Money” and then
include the second title at the beginning of your blog text, you would
then have used the word “laptop” 20 times. Using the word “laptop”
20 times in your 500 page article would give you a new keyword
density of 4%.


The examples above are very simplified examples, but enough to
understand why keywords, and how often you use them in your
writing, are important. Your goal should be to have a keyword density
of between 5% and 10% but not much higher than that. Adding too
many keywords into your blog will make it hard to read for your
readers and the search engines start to think you are building a splog
if you get much higher than 15-20%. Again this is an area where you
will want to strike a nice balance between what will be comfortable for
your readers and what will be okay by the search engines as well.