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You may have heard about blogging and how using keywords can be a really useful tool to boost your website in the search engines. That’s because when someone searches for a phrase – known as a “keyword”, though it may be more than just one word – the search engine looks through its directory of web pages and pulls out all those pages (and blog posts count as pages) that feature the keyword. It ranks those pages according to a number of factors and then displays the results to you. However, it’s important to understand how to use keywords in blogs, because it’s easy to get this wrong.
One of the factors Google uses is the number of occurrences of the keyword within the page.
In the old days, the calculation was simple – the more times the keyword was used, the more relevant Google thought the article must be and the higher it would display that page in its rankings. However, people got wise to that and would start spamming their web pages with lots and lots of keywords that were regularly searched for but quite often they actually had no relevance to the subject matter! So now Google still looks for keywords within the article – but it’s much fussier about how many times a keyword is used, and also where the keyword is used.
How to use keywords in blogs
When you want to optimise your website for search engines, the trick of how to use keywords in blogs is to choose one highly relevant keyword and use it strategically. Keywords act as signifiers to the content of the post, so choose a phrase that people are likely to search for that sums up what your post is about.
You then need to use your keyword in specific places within the blog post to let Google know what your post is about. The first two places to include your keyword are:
- The URL of the page (so your URL for the post might be www.mywebsite.co.uk/blog/keyword)
- The page title
You can actually set up most blogging platforms to automatically use the title of the blog post as the URL.
Next you need to think about where to use your keyword within the content of the post. Don’t overdo it … use it maybe three or four times within the body of the post. If you spam your post with the keyword Google will know, and you’ll actually lose out when your page is ranked.
Somewhere in your post, place an H2 header that includes your keywords.
Finally, make sure you use your keyword in the meta information – the data that appears at the top of every web page. While Google places less importance on meta data than it once did, other search engines still use the meta data to find out what a site is about. Use your keyword in the meta title (which is usually the same as the post title) and also in the meta description, which is a short, 160 character summary of the page content. You can also include it in the meta keywords – Google completely ignores meta keywords nowadays, but other search engines still use them, and you won’t be penalised for including them.This again acts as a signifier to Google that your page is relevant to the keyword.
I hope you now have more of an insight into how to use keywords in blogs, and you’ll be able to start optimising your own blog posts to get the best ranking in the search engines. And if you want to see a practical example of how to use keywords in blogs take a read back through this post and see if you can work out what keyword I was targeting!
If you’d like to talk to one of the team at HodgesNet about blogging, or you need help with setting up a blog or creating content, give us a call on +44(0)8432 894 402 or fill in the contact form.
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