Clearly there is no better way to achieve success on the Internet than gaining great visibility. In fact, one of the best ways to get that visibility is to know how to choose and use the best keywords to rank your blog or your website.

As we will see today, there are small details that can make a huge difference when we talk about keywords. The correct choice of words is important for obtaining the best results possible.

Keep in mind that Google is relatively effective in ranking the most relevant sites in the top positions. Therefore, it is your task to choose the right words for the articles of your website or blog. Google uses complex patterns and algorithms to give us what it believes we are looking for.

But before discussing complex algorithms and equations, we should start at the beginning and define what I will be speaking about today.

What are keywords?

A keyword is a word, or set of words that define what your content is about.

That is why choosing your keywords is very important. You must anticipate what others will be searching for on the search engines so you can position yourself to get the click.

Let’s look at an example:

If you pay attention to any political campaign, you will see that there are phrases or words that are repeated constantly. These repetitions (which are clear reinforcements) are being said and repeated for a reason.These keywords are the ones that summarize the ideology that this candidate wants you to remember.

In other words, what a politician wants is plain and simple, to attract followers that resonate with his views..

As in this example, the same thing happens with the words we choose as our keywords. Those phrases or words are the ones (ideally) used by our target audience to find the product they are looking for. Therefore, they are the ones that we must use to attract them to our site..

To do this, let’s now look at what types of keywords we can use to meet our goal.

Types of keywords

There are basically two types of keywords: generic keywords, and long tail keywords.

Generic keywords – unspecific terms that get searched for. example “Yoga pants” or “Dog walker” would be considered a generic keyword.

Long Tail Keywords –  are longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re closer to a point-of-purchase. Example: “Where can I buy a Iphone online”.

How do keywords help my website?

Following the example of the political campaign, the keywords that are repeated in the speech are aimed at marking an ideology and winning followers, and all this is done by appealing to a need: that of belonging to a group.

When you write a post for your blog, this does not change much. What you are looking for, as I said before, is to easily be found among thousands of articles.

Once you have chosen the topic you want to talk about, you must make proper use of the keywords following a process of analysis and rationalization. Then it will be Google’s turn to “read” those keywords and decide if the text we’re offering is the one that best fits what our target audience is looking for.

All this, of course has its logic: search engines are nothing more than match-finders. And this is pure mathematics, since they use search algorithms created specifically for this purpose.

How to choose the best keywords for your blog

All right. If you’ve read this far, you know what keywords are and why they are so valuable in trying to improve your ranking on search engines.

Below we will take a look at the steps we need  successfully meet our SEO strategy.

1 – Choose the keywords that best fit your target audience

The best way to clarify this first point is by asking yourself a question: Are you sure that the keywords you have chosen fit the needs of the people you want to reach?

It may seem like common sense but it is crazy how many people get this worng.

2 – Choose keywords based on what people are really looking for

You can write the best article in the world in terms of content, but it will not work if it does not reflect a real need.

There are some very valuable tools available you can use to know what people are talking about.

One of them is SEMrush, a very powerful tool used to identify keywords and analyze your competition.

Another excellent tool is Google Keyword Planner  since it helps you choose the best keywords for your blog for free (although it is much more focused on Adwords ad campaigns).

TIP: Always keep in mind that you must be very attentive to trends, as they constantly change. What is significant today or now, will not be tomorrow or later..

3 – Check the 10 best articles that already use the keywords you are considering

Sometimes you do not need a specific tool to know which items are well ranked  for the keywords you want to use.

You should keep an eye on items that are ranking well. What keywords do they use? How often? Are they a services, products or information?

The quality of the results of that search also says a lot. If you discover that within the first 10 results there are very poor written articles or are simply spam, you are very likely to rank very high using those keywords.

4 – Be Specific

If you use specific words and adjusted them to what you are offering, you are much more likely to rank higher in Google searches. The clearer you are the more likely you will  be found and be ranked by Google and other search engines.

5 – Use the main keyword in the title and if possible in the first and last paragraph

Titles are hugely important in on page SEO

Using the main keyword in both the title and the first paragraph  will not only help you increase the chances of appearing in the top results of the search engines, but will give a clear message to your audience on the subject that you are writing about.

6 – Use long-tailed keywords

In step number 4 we talked about being specific.

Long tail keywords are those three and four keyword phrases which are very, very specific to whatever you are selling. You see, whenever a customer uses a highly specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they are actually going to buy. In virtually every case, such very specific searches are far more likely to convert to sales than general generic searches that tend to be geared more toward the type of research that consumers typically do prior to making a buying decision.

Now let’s see in a basic way how we should use the keywords in the content.

How to correctly use keywords in your content

I’m now going to tell you how to apply keyword density and semantics to your content.

“The density of a keyword is the number of times a word is repeated in your content compared to the total word count.”

Example:

With a article of 1,000 words and the main keyword is “blog ranking”, which is repeated 12 times, therefore its keyword density is 1.2%.

You must try not to repeat the words to many times because a very high keyword density will be considered by Google as Keyword Stuffing (over-optimizing the content).

Your  keyword density should range between 0.5% to 2%.

Now I’m going to talk to you about something I’ve already mentioned, semantics.

Google, uses LSI (latent semantic indexing), which is a mathematical method used to determine the relationship between terms and concepts in content. The contents of a webpage are crawled by a search engine and the most common words and phrases are collated and identified as the keywords for the page.

For example, if you write an article about pizza, you will most likely mention Italy, Margarita, tomato, baking etc. For article to be relevant, it needs to have all these words within it.

If you do this correctly you will increase the chances of gaining more organic visibility.

Now it’s time to use the tools that will help you choose the best keywords to rank your blog post.

Essential Tools and Techniques for Keyword Analysis

In this section I will try to teach you how to analyze the competence of a keyword, how to search the trends that have the key words that interest you, why domain authority is important and what tools are the right ones for a precise and realistic analysis of your competition .

It is always better to use a set of tools rather than just one. But in this section I will focus on one of my favorite tools: SEMrush.

To perform a keyword analysis of your competition you have (within SEMrush) the “Keyword Difficulty Tool” function, which you can check the difficulty (or average) of a specific keyword.

Once you enter the keyword, you will see not only your degree of difficulty, but the volume of searches, trends and even the SERP sources, in order of greater to lesser relevance. For a detailed analysis of the trends you can use the “Overview” section, where you will also find detailed information on both organic and paid search.

In addition to these results, SEMrush offers a list of the first 20 URLs ranking, You can use this to see what related keywords make those URLs rank at the top.

In addition to SEMrush, there is also another tool you can use to obtain actual data on the domain authority of websites or Landing Pages.

We are talking about Moz (or MozBar). By installing this bar in your browser you will have easy access to the keywords used by a URL, your domain authority, your back-links, etc.

 

You can use these two tools to learn about the authority of a page.  Domain Authority is something that we should not neglect in the process of choosing the keywords to rank for. Knowing your competitors ranking and DA will help you to determine if you will be able to rank for a  keyword.

Bonus: SEMrush and its new SEO Keyword Magic Tool

As we have seen above, SEMrush is very useful for searching and analyzing the right keywords to help you rank your blog.

This research sometimes requires a great deal of effort and Brainstorming but using specific tools cam make the process easier.

Remember what we said above: To achieve the best results in your SEO strategies it is important to choose the most relevant keywords for the project at hand.

Researching keywords involves continuous discovery, careful consideration of new opportunities and niches, and integration with the rest of your digital marketing efforts in order to achieve more cost-effective results.

Compiling a single list of keywords and using it for your content for several months will  not bring many benefits, and in fact it’s not the best strategy to follow. It can even lead to a penalty of your content by trying to rank in the SERP more than once for each term.

The features and standards of search engines have been changing almost from the day they became available to the general public.

If this is a fact, how can you do more dynamic keyword research with the aim of including relevant terms … and also remain profitable in the long term?

Thinking about this, SEMrush has created a new tool that is available in the beta version within the section of keyword analytics, and is called ” SEO KeyWord MagicTool “.

 

Thanks to this new tool you can save a lot of time, since you can perform an automatic calculation of the potential of the keywords in seconds, presenting you with some valuable metrics including the following:

• CPC and its volume
• The difficulty of the keywords.
• Your level of competence.
• Some SERP functionalities.

Another advantage of this tool is that it allows us to download up to 1 million keywords in a single file. This means that we will not have to jump from one document to another to continue working.

And there is more,  it offers us another very interesting function: the possibility of grouping the terms related to a specific market niche, in addition to a complete evaluation to help us in the decision to look for unknown niches and / or potential business.

CONCLUSION

Stop a moment to think and question  yourself. Ask yourself the following;

Do you know what keywords you are using? Are you sure that they are the best and the most appropriate according to the market niche you want to target?

 

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