Incorporating keywords in your blog posts was one of the points I raised in my teleseminar on ‘Blogs aren’t scary, they’re fun!’ last May.
Keywords or key-phrases are particular words that are the most searched for in search engines. You can find them through websites such as Wordtracker, and including them in your blog posts helps raise your status in these search engines: they are, in fact, search engine spider food.
It’s good to include these, but make sure they are relevant to the subject as well as being ‘hot’ at that present moment.
I talked about including keywords or key-phrases into four places in your post:
• in the headline (because it later becomes the permalink or URL for that post)
• in the first paragraph (preferably in the first sentence so that both readers and spiders immediately ‘get’ the subject)
• in the middle (because that’s a place spiders look)
• in the final paragraph (another place spiders are programmed to search)
I was reading a post about article marketing the other day and I noticed how the author had incorporated his keywords into the post. He had followed the concept stated above to the letter. The final paragraph was exceptionally bad, as every sentence had the keyword either beginning it or at the end. The result was that it was incredibly boring to read, so much so that I clicked away.
Here are some other points it might be good to take into consideration if you wish to retain readership as well as spider interest:
• be aware that people skim read an article or post to see if it is relevant
• bullet points are a good way of highlighting elements
• keywords should be positioned also to catch the reader’s attention
• only the first 25% of an article is truly read before the reader decides it is worth continuing with or not
• small paragraphs also helps with the reader’s comprehension as well as attention span
• the average amount of time spent reading a blog post is 96 seconds
• therefore short and sweet posts fare better than long ones
Another keyword tip I picked up is that spiders cannot ’see’ punctuation, so if you have a key-phrase (keywords in a short sentence), you can add variance to your sentences by inserting full stops or commas in between if this helps maintain the interest value.
Don’t forget keywords should be also for your reader’s benefit as well as strategically placed for the search engine spiders, so don’t penalise your audience purely for search engine optimisation.
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