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.
