Getting traffic to your blog is vitally important for the success of your website. By far the best way of driving traffic is to get your web pages ranking highly on search engine results pages (SERPs), such as Google or Bing.
To achieve this, you need to be including targeted keywords in your blog posts & articles, so that people can find your site through search engines when they are looking for relevant information.
What Are Keywords?
When you are searching for information on the web, you use a search engine like Google. You do this by typing in some words describing what they are looking for, whether that is in a sentence (e.g. – How to improve SEO on my website?), or just a few words (e.g. – How to SEO).
The search engine checks its database to look for all the relevant pages online that include the words that you searched for, and displays the results that best match what you are looking for.
These words that people use to search with are called ‘Keywords‘ or ‘Search Terms‘.
Now, you will know that when you only use a single key word in a search engine, you will generate results that are very broad and generally totally irrelevant! To fine-tune a web search, you need to use a number of words or a phrase. This helps the search engine to find more relevant information that will be of use for you.
Why are Keywords important?
Keywords are important because you can include them within your blog posts or website. If you make sure that you include lots of relevant keywords within your web pages, then people will be able to find your page easier when searching on Google or Bing. This is a really easy and free way to drive targeted traffic to your website.
What Keywords Should You Use To Get Website Traffic?
One of the first things that you should do when you sit down to write an article or page for your website, is to find out what the relevant keywords are. You need to know what words, phrases, search terms that people are using to search for relevant information.
For example, I may want to write a blog post on something to do with improving website SEO. I would use a keyword tool to search for all the relevant keywords and phrases that I could use within that blog post. This way, when I actually write it, I can include all of these relevant keywords to help my post rank higher on SERPs and be found by people on search engines more easily.
Keyword Tool Research
I use the ‘Google Keyword Tool‘ to research all of my keywords. You can find this great tool within your own Google AdWords account, under the ‘Reporting & Tools’ tab.
Now, I will have a general idea of the topic that I am going to write about for my latest post, which means I will also have a general idea of the Keywords that I can use. Within the ‘Google Keyword Tool‘ you can enter in words or phrases that you want to search for. So, if I use the previous example of “improving website SEO” I would enter in; SEO, improve website SEO, website traffic, etc.
Google will search to find the information related to these keywords. The first column ‘Competition‘ shows literally how much keyword competition there is. The higher the rating, the more pages there are online that use that keyword, so try to use keywords/phrases that have LOW ‘Competition’, so your page will rank higher!
The next two columns, ‘Global Monthly Searches‘ & ‘Local Monthly Searches‘ shows how many monthly searches that are conducted with those specific keywords. Mine are the same because I have selected ‘Location: All’, but you could search for results for a certain country, such as ‘Location: UK’ or ‘Location: Cyprus’ depending on your website audience. The higher these values are, the better. You want lots of people searching for the keywords that you choose because they are the potential audience that you are writing for. This is why I have discounted the keyword, ‘improve website SEO’ because it has such a small global monthly search value.
So, to summarize. You want to find Keywords with LOW ‘Competition’ and HIGH ‘Global Monthly Searches’/’Local Monthly Searches’. The more people that are searching for your keywords and the less competition those Keywords have from other web pages, the more likely your web page/blog post will be found. This will help drive traffic to your site!
Google will also display all of the Keywords that it believes are relevant, based on the ones that you previously entered. Here you can search through and find the ones that are of most use to you, to use within your post.
You can see that the one I am most interested in is, “what is SEO” because it has relatively LOW competition and very HIGH global monthly searches. I would continue selecting a handful of keywords that I could use within my post based on LOW ‘Competition’ and HIGH ‘Global Monthly Searches’/’Local Monthly Searches’.
How To Use Targeted Keywords Within Web Pages/Blog Posts
Now that you have a selection of targeted keywords to use, how do you use them to get more traffic? Well, we implement them using On-Page SEO techniques.
Use your targeted keywords within your;
- Page Titles
- Meta-Descriptions
- URL Structure
- Body Tags
- Image SEO
- Bold & Italic Tags
Using these On-Page SEO techniques and including your keywords within them, helps search engines to more accurately identify what information is on your web page. If they can more accurately assess what your page is about, then they can suggest it to more people when it is searched for.
Simply put, you are making it easier for people to find your website, which will help to drive traffic to your site. Just remember; Keywords should have LOW competition and HIGH monthly searches!
If you need help with your Keyword Research send me your Website URL and the Keywords you would like to be found for.