Following on from Niches and taking the next step up the Stairway to Freedom let’s talk about Finding Keywords for your website.
Finding the right keyword can be a bit daunting but it is extremely important. A lot of keywords wear out, especially for trendy articles. Some are way too broad and some far too specific.
The most important thing to remember is that your keywords are guides to your website. If you have taken a guided tour with an enthusiastic and well-informed guide versus one with someone who is just doing a job, relate this to your keywords. Good ones fill you with interest if not passion. The others make you wish you were elsewhere.
With your website you want the former affect. You want the visitors drawn eagerly to your site and retained with interesting, informative and helpful content. So keywords really need to be words that people use to find your site and then keep them there to read on.
From this you can see content is the main ingredient and keywords are the icing that initially attracts attention. As my mum used to say don’t overdo the icing. (Another bad habit picked up as she used to under do it and all we kids tend to overdo it. But so yummy!)
Use your keywords as these guides, fill your article with quality content and Google and other search engines will be eagerly following your website.
What are Keywords?
Keywords are the metal that unlocks the door to your posts and pages. They need to be a comfortable fit. As you are aware, trying to force a key into a lock it wasn’t made for, can jam the lock. So too can inappropriate keywords.
Your articles will be offering to help visitors make a choice and therefore need to be geared to these visitors and not the keywords.
Keywords should be geared to your visitors and are a search guide, not a stand-alone tool. They are the words you type into the search engine to find the information you are interested in.
I find that I often have an idea for my articles so I start writing them. Along the way words or phrases start standing out and looking like potentially good keywords. Ones that flow with the article naturally.
I use a very useful Wealthy Affiliate tool called Jaaxy to check out how these keywords will possibly work. I will expand on this for you in my Jaaxy post.
On the other hand I might have an idea for a useful post that I can find a keyword for by just going to Google. Then search for previous posts written around that idea and finding keywords. However the best place to find keywords is Jaaxy.
Jaaxy has the advantage of offering additional benefits having lots of other helpful information within.
Always think laterally when you are looking for keywords. As they say ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ so if you know your topic very well it is hard to step outside the expertise and find a keyword that appeals to the non-experts. After all if everyone was an expert they wouldn’t be visiting your site. So you need to have an all-around appeal.
How Keywords Work
Keywords bring more visitors to your site if they look natural for the article they promote. The end result is effective keywords, more traffic and better ranking on the various search engines. All of these encompass Search Engine Optimisation informally known as SEO. The improvement in ranking will bring about the potential for more reward.
Keywords are those that you use, when you search the web, to sift through all the information on the web and filter out the information you seek. Wow, with all the billions of bytes in crowded into the web, the right keyword does a fantastic job.
So your mission, should you so chose, is to find these fantastic keywords and select the best one to be your focal target keyword. Sort of like the Vanishing Point in drawing it draws the eye in.
Work this word into your article name and the first or second paragraph. That is it.
The niche you have chosen might be a great keyword or phrase. It’s up to you to figure this out. Jaaxy will certainly help you do this. The nice thing about Jaaxy is that you can initially access it for free but that is limited.
Over Using Keywords
Using the same target keyword in the same format, is called Keyword stuffing. This occurs when the same keyword is repeatedly used throughout your article. Don’t Do This!
You might find keywords that attract lots of traffic but have nothing to do with your article. Don’t Do This!
Inappropriate keywords and keyword stuffing make Google and other search engines quite twitchy. In fact, they may start ignoring you.
Overused target keywords also can become very annoying to your visitor, so much so they might get fed up and leave. It’s like the child that keeps repeating ‘are we there yet; are we there yet’ like a broken record. Article writing can be just like this if words or a phrase are constantly injected.
Don’t you worry about using the target keyword sparingly. Notably all words or phrases are potential keywords. Once you get going with your website you will be able to view data about how many of these words each article actually ranks for. Believe me some very odd ones rank.
Summarising what you need in a keyword:
- As a guide to your website
- That ask a question of your potential visitors. How to’s are a great example! People often come to a website to answer questions they have.
- Look at your site’s product and formulate questions around it. Then use these as Keyword phrases. (Affectionately known as ‘Long Tail Keywords’.
- That suit your topic comfortably.
- That basically go with your flow
Good, sound keywords will give you and your website an authority that will draw visitors to you and draw them on to read more of your posts. Overuse is not a good sign of optimising your website. People notice and your authority is lowered.
Good keywords will attract the right kind of visitors to your website. People who need your input on making the right decision for themselves.
Never worry about not being able to find a lot of great keywords for your site. As I mentioned above every word or phrase of words are keywords. (I expect the ‘a’, I, of’s etc of the written word won’t be too effective though!)
Finally, once your website is up and indexed in the search engines, go and take a look at all the keywords your site is actually ranked for. Some of these might be great for a new article.
Following your dreams, goals, niches and keywords the next step is to read about the best keyword tool in the world and how to use it in your keyword searches to advance up the Stairway to Freedom.
For further information I have written a blog for my fellow Wealthy Affiliate colleagues. If you would like to have a read you can find it on this link.
Share This
I have always struggled to understand keywords and their function. This article has given me a better insight and understanding on keywords and how to use them correctly .Thanks for the informative advice, it will help me, moving forward with my own writing. Thanks Helen
Jenny, just think, every word and phrase you wrote in your comment is a keyword! Never angst about keywords. When I started I spent ages looking these up on Jaaxy. It didn’t take long, and looking at my website analytics, to see how many keywords I actually obtained.
Now I relax and write my article. Then I pick words and phrases and run them through Jaaxy. I get a good selection of keywords, pick the most appropriate and make that my target keyword. This seems to give a more natural feel to the article.
I am glad I gave you this insight and thanks for visiting.
Ciao
Helen
Hi Helen,
Your article is an eye-opening when it comes to using keywords properly. More often we tend to focus on keywords and forget that we are writing not just for Google and other Search Engines but rather for REAL humans.
Of course as you rightly said these keywords direct people to our wbsite as it is what they type in Search Engines. However, over using them will make our articles boring and visitors wont keep long on our website since they don’t find any real value in what they are reading.
So you have really helped me today. I will now focus much more on given value to my readers instead of just writing content and stuffing them with keywords.
Thanks a lot for sharing this useful information. It was very helpful reading.
Stephen.
Stephen, this was written as I have noticed so many people get tied up in knots over keywords. Keywords are in reality just words people use to ask questions. I suppose that is the reason I don’t pay much attention to them until I write my articles.
Then I view the articles with my keyword glasses! I actually found my domain this way. I was trying to write something and I was listening to Lou Reed’s Walking on the Wildside. Something clicked and I looked up my slightly altered phrase in Jaaxy. And the .com was available. Well that was a wonderful surprise.
The main thing is to write quality content, find the natural keywords within it and then check for suitability on Jaaxy keyword search program.
Thanks for your very positive comment.
Ciao
Helen
Interesting article. I generally know what keywords are about but I do have a question. Do keywords have to relate to your domain name? For instance, say I had a kitchen website called ‘thebestkitchen’. If I wrote a post called ‘best camping backpacks’ and used this as my keyword, would Google penalize me, as it has nothing to do with my domain? Hope this makes sense.
I certainly don’t believe so with the domain. Your target keyword needs to relate to your article for sure. Some people have a general blog type site. So to always fit in with the domain name would be quite difficult.
Look at my website here. Yes I do have articles that loosely talk about working from anywhere. However specific ones such as this post does relate but only because keywords are used everywhere.
Or maybe you could fit the best camping kitchen into your backpack!
Thanks for the comment.
Ciao
Helen
Hey i really enjoyed this article, i always think too hard sometimes for good key words. I always use Jaaxy and if my chances are very low for getting on the first page i always try different key words or decide to write a new article if i couldnt come up with good key words. The hard part is coming up with unique key words that will get searched for.
Justin, you won’t always find the perfect keyword. You can only try. Do you write your article first and then review it for a potential target keyword? That’s what I do. And yes, sometimes it’s hard to get it just what you want. Play around with it. I often will find a reasonable keyword that’s OK but has a higher QSR or lower SEO than recommended. So I take one of my other keywords with an really OK QSR and higher SEO and combine them. A type of low hanging long tailed keyword!
If you strive to find the perfect keyword you might never be happy. Don’t write a new article. Just try a new method of compiling a reasonable target keyword. Are you writing naturally? This often helps. Don’t try to wrap your article around a keyword.
As for that, your article will contain many incognito keywords. You can check by going to Google Webmaster Tools, Search Traffic and Search Analytics. There you will get a list of keywords people have used to find you.
Thanks for your comment and hope I have helped you.
Ciao
Helen
“Keywords are the metal that unlocks the door to your posts and pages”. That has to be the best analogy I have ever heard about keywords. And you explain perfectly what keywords are, how they work and how one should implement them in their articles. My main concern is that content creators many times overfocus on keywords and forget about other important stuff like creating quality content for example. There are so many things to take into consideration. A keyword alone will not unlock the door unless the whole package fits.
John, nice of you to visit me and thanks for the nice comment.
I don’t actually focus on keywords. Something that amazes me is how many people think a keyword is a magic thing. Well in fact it, or they, are really only ordinary words. I have been telling people this for a while so I just went and tested my theory on a neat keyword program called Jaaxy.
I tested ‘an’ and ‘it’. I found ‘it’ is searched way more than ‘an’. Almost 800,000 times! And the KQI is NORMAL. I bet if you actually used just these you wouldn’t get far though!
I find the best way to find keywords is to write my article and then select and test a few words or phrases within the content. I always find some good ones. This makes the stress much lighter.
Come back and visit anytime. I like conversing with you.
Ciao
Helen
Thank you for this really helpful post about keywords. I liked your section on “keyword stuffing” and will have a look at my own website for overuse of keyword phrases.
I noticed you are promoting the Jaaxy Keyword Tool.
Can you tell me a little bit more about what this tool includes and what I will get if I decide to purchase this product?
Thanks, Jeff.
Jeff, thanks for your comment. About Jaxxy, I have done an article on this. It should explain it all. Here is the link. https://workingonthewildside.c…. Have a read of that and come back to me if you then have any remaining questions.
Jaaxy has so much information and I love playing with it.
I find so many people, and not only newcomers, are still confused about keywords. All words are keywords. I have told so many people this and have now done a Wealthy Affiliate blog on it. If you are interested here is that link. https://my.wealthyaffiliate.co…
Ciao
Helen