The Art of Working Your Keywords & Phrases Into Content

Using keywords and keyword phrases properly within your content is really sort of an art. You want the content you create to contain the right keywords, but you also want the content to be easily ingested by the user. You don’t want your audience tripping over words that are out of place, misspelled and even misused all in the name of using keywords in your content for search engines.

Research Your Keywords – Before using any keywords it’s important to research them. Start with your seed words, then develop a list of keywords that you know will get results because of the information you’ve discovered.

Write Like You Talk – Many people get very nervous about writing content because they think it’s hard. But, if you can talk about your topic out loud then you can write. The first pass of the content should include an outline that includes the keywords you’ve chosen, then just write about each subheading as if you’re talking to a friend.

Edit and Add Keywords – Once you think you’re done writing, just letting it all flow out of you, take the time to go through and add the keywords you’ve decided to use for this participle piece of content. Add it to your title, headings, subheadings, ensure it’s within the first 100 characters after any heading, and in the last paragraph.

Reread and Edit – Editing is very important. Editing twice is probably your best bet for ensuring that the keywords you use read correctly. Try reading it out loud the final edit to ensure that the words flow and make sense within the context you mean to use them in.

Write About Something Important to Your Audience – The content you publish should be important, valuable, and useful to your audience. If it’s not relevant it doesn’t matter how great your headline is, or even how many people click through to read it. If it’s not something they need to know they’re not going to take action on it.

Make Some of Your Content Long Content – Long-form content, epic content, or cornerstone content is very important for SEO purposes. The longer the content the more you can work the keywords you want to rank for into the content. Long content has more room for H1 tags, subheadings, and more.

Use Analytics Strategically – Your friend for making sure that your efforts are working are the analytics you have access to. Google Analytics and the analytics native in your email software, blogging platform, and so forth are all important to understand and view to ensure that you’re getting good results from your efforts.

Promote Everything You Write –  Part of SEO is self-promotion. Use social media to push out the content you’ve created to help get it on people’s radar. It can take time for a search engine to crawl your website and start delivering the new content as a search result. By promoting everything you write you will encourage this process to go faster.

Practice, Practice, Practice – It takes practice to get it right and the more you try the better you’ll get at it. One good way to learn to make good titles is to create a swipe file of effective titles that you have noticed that are optimized. Don’t copy but you can use the style for your own needs.

Creating SEO titles that include important keywords and key phrases into them takes practice so that they make sense. You need to learn how to form the titles and headlines in a way that shows what the reader will learn when they click through without tricking them or being clever or misleading.

Google has some great Keyword Tools