If you are in the blogging business, then you must have heard how important keyword research is when it comes to growing your following. But keyword research actually goes far beyond just blogging. It is used practically throughout the whole of the internet. If you have a website or do any kind of commerce online, you will need to look out for keyword usage.
What Is Keyword Research?
So what is keyword research and how exactly does it work? Can we not write blog posts without caring about keywords and still be noticed? Well, the answer is yes, but only if you already have a following, a big following. So as long as you are not Angelina Jolie or Donald Trump, you will need to do some work.
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Search engines
Search engines, such as Google or Bing, allow us to find the right information and in a very efficient way. Whatever question you have, with the help of search engines, you can find the answer to it in a matter of seconds. This has completely revolutionized how information is consumed. Libraries and books are no longer as important as they used to be. Why go somewhere to read a book when you can get the exact information right from your computer or smartphone instantly?
The process of using a search engine is quite simple. You go online, to the preferred search engine’s website, and you type in the exact question that you have in mind, such “what is keyword research?”. Yep, you guessed it, that is the keyword phrase used in this article.
After hitting enter, you will get pages of results (SERP) with the most appropriate sources to answer your question. The search engines make the decision what you see and what you don’t, and they are pretty good at doing this.
Many different factors are taken into account when making the decision what to show you in the results page, such as the length of the article, the year it was published in, how old and popular the website that holds the article is, etc. The criteria are constantly updated and improved. However, arguably, the most important factor that is looked at when giving you the results is the use of keywords in those sources.
So if you write “what is keyword research”, the search engines will provide you with results regarding only those sources that also include the phrase “what is keyword research?” (and its synonyms). That is the only way to really link your search query to results.
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Doing keyword research
If you are writing a blog post, then there are really two main ways to approach the process.
Autocomplete
If you don’t know what to write about next, you can use google and various keyword research tools to get some new ideas. So for example, if your website is about cooking, then you could go to google.com, and start typing “best recipes”.
After writing “best recipes”, google will give you a number of other keywords which are often used when searching. These are the keywords that you can research further and eventually use in your blog posts.
Keyword research tools
The other, more sophisticated, approach is to use a keyword research tool, such as SEMrush.
A keyword research tool is the place to which you take your saved keywords and actually see how well they are doing. So if you go to SEMrush and type in “best recipes”, you will see a number of results as well as some other very interesting information. For example, below you can see that the key phrase “best banana bread recipe” has 33.100 searches every month, and that its keyword difficulty (KD) is 74.96 out of 100% (100 being the most difficult). In addition, the trendiness of the keyword looks very high and stable, which is good.
With this information at hand, you can now make a sophisticated decision about whether you want to write about a best banana bread recipe or something else. Moreover, after seeing the results, you may also decide not to write about something you initially wanted to, such as “best sugar cookie recipe”.
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So as you can see, keyword research tools are absolutely essential to keyword research and blogging. They help you avoid time doing work that no one will ever find, and push you to write about topics that people are actually interested in.
Applying keywords
As already mentioned, whether you have a blog about healthy diets or an online store at Amazon, you want to be found through the search engines. In practice, this means that you need to include the chosen keyword/key phrase in the text of your blog post/product page.
Start by having your keywords in the title as well the as the link (if possible) of the page you are trying to get noticed. Then, every once in a while, try to mention the keywords again in the body text. But keep in mind that you don’t need to repeat the same keyword over and over 100 times. This will not add any additional benefit and will damage the quality of your message.
Back in the days, people would do what is called as “keyword stuffing”. They basically threw in as many keywords as possible, just so that the search engines could rank them higher. Well, it did work for a while, but not any longer. Today the search engines are smart enough to understand that you are just trying to find away around the system. As a matter of fact, if today you do keyword stuffing, you will get ranked down for it, making it even harder to have a presence on the internet.
So how many keywords are ok then? The answer is that every once in a while is ok. Don’t focus on it too much. As long as you are using keywords naturally, you will not have any problems and the search engines will still be able to pick your text up. As an example, take the phrase “what is keyword research” and see how many times I used it in this article.
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Conclusion
While knowing how to use keywords is essential, you have to understand that there is no one magic bullet way to rank quickly above everyone else. It takes time and effort. However, using keywords in your content guarantees that you at least can be found in the search engine results and you will be found if you keep working and don’t give up.
Not all of your keywords will be able to rank high, but every once in a while you will hit the right spot when you least expect it. That is when you will experience noticeable growth.
To conclude, it is good to know that cheating the system does not work, nor should you ever make an attempt to do so. It will be noticed and your blog will get penalized, putting your wonderful hobby and business at risk. Black hat techniques are used all the time by different people in the hope of making their websites more popular, but at the of the day, only those that have been honest, creative in their content and consistent are the ones to make it. Let’s hope you will be one of them.
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