Using the correct keywords or tags will help get your message
in front of those people who are looking for it. The first rule of using
keywords is relevance to your content — in other words using a keyword such as HOTELS (one of the most popular
searched-for keywords) for a children’s story about turtles is NOT appropriate;
however if you are writing a travel blog HOTELS
is not only relevant but guaranteed to ping your site in search engines.
According to PageTraffic, the 10 most searched terms on the
web are: hotels, facebook, youtube,
craigslist, facebook login, aquarius, google, ebay, yahoo, and yahoo mail. Don’t despair if none of
these terms are appropriate for your content. Make a list of all the keywords you
feel apply, you should have at least 10 to 20; if you can, choose more so that you
can select the highest performers, we’ll discuss ranking in a moment. When
choosing keywords remember that YOUR name is your brand so definitely include
it even if it is not on a TOP list; if someone wants news about Chelle Cordero
they are going to put my name into a search engine.
If you use HTML on your blog or website, you can use MetaTags,
I copied this from http://www.metatags.org/examples_making_meta_tags
which has more details and how-to’s:
name="keywords" content="wood, furniture, garden, garden-table, etc.">
This is a test text
Nothing between the < > brackets shows on the site but
is read by search engines; If you go to a website and click to see the Source you will usually see this information.
A good way to get keyword ideas is to go to a successful competitor’s site and
look at the Source to see what keywords they use; again, if you decide to use
any of these keywords, choose what is relevant to YOUR content and will not
trick any unsuspecting viewers.
Some blog/web-sites such as blogspot.com or wordpress.com have
space for Tags or Labels, you would list your keywords here and they have the same
effect on search engines (although they are visible online). Separate your key
words/phrases with a comma and limit your choices to 20 or less (if you use too
many keywords or letters, you will not be able to publish your post.
In order to find the most effective keywords: 1) Choose
relevant words/phrases from YOUR content; 2) Look at competitor’s sites; 3)
Check for trending topics on Twitter, PageTraffic, and Google Trends; 4) Pare
down your list if necessary by searching your search terms in Google Trends. If
you have similar terms you will be able to choose which is higher ranking; for
instance I write Romantic Suspense which has a higher rank than Romance so if I
need to I can eliminate Romance from my list and use Romantic Suspense. 5) Once
again, be sure to include relevant-specific terms (like your name) whether or
not these rank high.
Writing Exercise:
Choose any five news articles and make a list of specific keywords you
would use to get them picked up by search engines.
Writing Prompt:
What search terms do YOU commonly put into search engines? Do you find
the results you are looking for?
Challenge Assignment:
Using trending topics, choose any five and write a blog post that would
incorporate each of those keywords.
