Yesterday I took part in a blogging Q&A session.
One of the questions asked related to keywords - Do you need keywords in blog posts?
I thought I would write a post about it as it’s something that comes up in conversation often, along with do you really blog every day? Where do you find the time?
It’s never a good idea to write random posts and expect to have traffic find you, you should have some sort of keyword plan, even if that plan is only in your head.
Start with keyword research and find a stack of good longtail keyphrases.
There are two tools that I can recommend (and use) that will help you with the keyphrases for your blog:
- Google Adwords tool
- Market Samurai (aff link but has a free 30 day trial)
Know your what the best keywords are for your blog. For example: kids activities. You can use it as kids activities for outside, kids activities camping, Kids indoor activities, kids activity play centres. Go and explore how to find keywords for your blog and create a nice list of the most useful ones. Then pin your list to your laptop or monitor. They are harder to forget when they are right in front of your face 
Look at the long tail keywords, and look at how you can build them into your posts. Don’t go nuts with keywords, or your post will be impossible to read. Although it may rank nicely in the search engines, your human readers will be running for the hills screaming, and that is never a good thing.
As well as incorporating keywords into your post you should anchor text (which is your keyword phrase hyperlinked) to internal pages and posts within your blog. This is sometimes called deep-linking or internal linking. By linking to other relevant keywords within your blog posts you enable the reader to quickly access content on a similar topic, it makes better and natural navigation.
Keep track of what you’ve linked to and what your anchor text was, you can vary your keywords and phrases so your site isn’t dominated by one specific phrase. It’s easily done even if we don’t mean to do it.
Sometimes it might work in your favour to add a location to your post’s content along with the keyword, using our example above we now have kids activities Essex, kids activities New York etc and this can bring you valuable local traffic from search engines.
Not every single post you write should be optimised for keywords; that would just sap the joy out of blogging.
And there is nothing to stop you going back and optimising some of your older posts so that they do better, in fact it might be a better starting point – optimising older content rather than trying to write and embed your chosen phrases as you go along.
Picking the right keywords can mean a lot of search traffic coming your way. Optimise your content by becoming more organised and having a plan to hand.
Share with us in the comments how you derive your keywords and if you optimise older content.
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About Sarah Arrow
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