Keywords are crucial for any SEO campaigns. A keyword can be any single word or group of words. However, this is not the proper keyword definition. The definition of a keyword is much broader in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). In the context of SEO, keyword can be a single word or group of words (phrase) that concludes or describes the content present on a particular webpage. These keywords generally serve as a shortcut or title that sum up the entire content present on a particular web page of any website. Various parts of webpage’s metadata are formed with these kinds of keywords. These various parts of webpage’s metadata help search engine crawlers to decide if the page matches with the search query or not. It clearly indicated that choosing right and relevant keywords for metadata is crucial for search engine optimization.
In the beginning era of search engines, keywords played central role for the functionality of these search engines. Various websites were crawled by search engine bots. If the keywords of the webpage are matched accurately with search query, the website was given higher priority / rank / higher index listing in search engine results. However, this system was soon violated and abused by many traffic hungry website owners. Those people stuffed their website’s metadata with bunch of keywords aiming to show their website higher in the search result. Many of those keywords were not related to their content so they ended up showing in irrelevant queries too. This violation was heavily affecting user experience of Google search engine. This caused the importance of keywords in SEO to reduce massively. It is certain that keywords are still important for the SEO campaign, yet, they are not as important as they were once since there are a lot of new SEO factors to take in concern rather than just keywords.
Importance of keywords in SEO:
Until now, you may have very well understood the basic idea about keywords, let us go a little bit dip now. While running SEO campaign for a particular blog post or website, we have an option of selecting or defining our targeted keywords or targeted search phrases. This choice is known as Meta keywords. If we go back into the year of 2012 (just four years though), Meta keywords were crucial for SEO since they helped search engines understand what your content is all about. However in 2016, these Meta keywords are not that crucial as they were in past. In this kind of short period of four years, search engine bots have updated their algorithm. Search engines now no more require Meta keywords. They are now smart enough to detect your keywords automatically and rank the page according to those detected keywords.
There is no sense in stuffing the Meta keywords since Google has officially announced that their search engine does not consider Meta keywords any more. Google was forced to so since new websites and bloggers were abusing the old keyword based algorithm by adding a bunch (bigger one) of keywords to their web pages. Let us take his article as an example. Keywords for this page might be keywords, keywords tips, SEO, keyword research, etc. Now assume that irrelevant keywords such as tips and tricks are added. Now, people searching for SEO tips and tricks would come to the blog and just leave since they do not find anything useful here. This will eventually affect the web page’s bounce rate and reduce average time on site greatly.
Now after discussing the keyword definition and importance, we will move the discussing to how one can conduct research in order to find high ranking and relevant keywords for his web page.
Using free keyword planner for keyword research:
There are a number of free keyword planner tools available that can help you to pick quality keywords for your blogs and web pages of your websites. We will be discussing some of the best Google keyword ranking trackers and free keyword planner tools. By conducting a keyword research, you can find some trending keywords that are related to your niche. This will allow you to know about keywords that are important in your niche. You can them simply render these keywords in your blog / website to help it grow good in short period of time so that you can earn some bucks through it.
Now first of all, you may keep it clear that these tools cannot just scan your article and provide you with best keywords. You have to use some strategy to take some good out of these tools. Here are some most used free keyword planners:
- SEMRUSH:
First of all, you can use this tool free only for 15 days. Then it will cost you $150 afterwards for lifetime activation. This tool is a great source for some great keywords. There is also an alternative way of using this tool. You can paste URL of any website and this tool will show all the keywords with which the pasted website is ranking. This is a great advantage of using this tool. Simply pick up some top blogs that fall under the same niche as yours. Use this online tool and find the keywords using which these keywords are ranking high. Now that you have got some high quality keywords, all you have to do is to build your next article / blog post around these keywords using quality and relevant content. Thanks to all these advantages it is worth paying $150 for this tool since it would be lifetime activation. This keyword generator functions online completely and does not require any software to be downloaded.
- Keyword planner tool.
This is a completely free tool for searching high ranking keywords. Despite of this free keyword planner being completely free of costs, this tool does not function / work as simple as SEMRUSH does (that’s why it is free, after all). However, with time and use of this tool, it would also feel as simple as SEMRUSH does, so as far as you are skilled enough, the complexity is not going to be a problem. It should be noticeable that this keyword suggestion tool does not function online. You will have to manually download and install it on your system from their website before you can enjoy using it.
- Long Tail Pro:
This is another free keyword suggestion tool that has to be downloaded and installed on the desktop before using it. Functionality of this tool is much similar to keyword planner tool mentioned above.
- Ahrefs:
If activations costs are ignored this online keyword generator is a perfect replica of online tool SEMRUSH which stands first in the list. It is a simple and easy to use tool with easy to understand user interface. This tool can either be used online or downloaded on the desktop too.
Using Google’s instant search for acquiring keywords:
It is hard to find a person that is not friendly with Google search engine. All most every internet user uses it on daily basis. While typing a search query in Google’s search bar, you may have very well noticed that Google automatically make suggestions matching to our search query. These suggestions are not random. Google suggest search keywords phrases that are frequently searched worldwide and also match with our search query. This feature can serve as a useful tool to find high ranking keywords that can be used in your next post. Once you figure out some profitable keywords, all you have to do is to prepare a SEO optimized blog post / article relevant to those keywords. There are various online guides available that would help you to understand how certain keywords can be targeted in a particular post. You can use them if you are not so friendly with SEO writing.
Proper placement and density of keywords:
Keyword density within a single post is crucial. It can either get you penalized or ranked high, better be cautious about it. A particular percentage of keyword density can be maintained depending on the all short tail and long tail keywords embedded in the article. When your website is being scanned (or “crawled” they say) by search engine bots density of the keywords help them determining the keyword that the page will rank for.
Despite of keyword targeting being important for webpage ranking in search engine results, one must always stay away from keyword stuffing. Overusing irrelevant / relevant, outnumbered keywords within a single post is known as keyword stuffing. It will eventually lead your webpage to irrelevant traffic following with a ban / penalty by Google’s search engine bots. It is certainly harmful for reputation of your website in Google’s eye.
Different webmasters have their own different ideas in terms of keyword density. However, most of them recommend keeping the keyword density to be less than 2 percent within a single page / article. These keywords should be used with related search terms that are also known as LSI keywords. There is no limit on number of targeted keywords in a single article. However, it is recommended to keep the count within three or four max. Always remember to use high quality and relevant content in the article. It will definitely help you gaining rank through indirect long-term keywords.
Effects of keyword stuffing:
Stuffing articles and blog posts with keywords is never a good idea. While crawling you website, if Google bots detect overuse of keywords, they would figure out that you are attempting to spam the website / blog with irrelevant and unnecessary keywords. Such actions are penalized by Google and directly affect your rankings since Google bots now know that your website is attempting to trick the system by using a bunch of keywords repeatedly in the blog. It is recommended to be wise while picking up the number of keywords are going to use in your SEO campaign. Unnatural SEO actions are recommended to be completely avoided since Google Panda is introduced.
Using Meta tile, description and keywords:
Let us assume that you are now equipped with perfect keywords for you next blog. Let us go a bit further and assume that you have already prepared the new blog post of webpage embedding those keywords. It is recommended to use these keywords in title and subheading of the post / article. However, it should be done in a meaningful way. It is recommended to avoid using numberings for your permalinks. There is a reason behind this suggestion. In future, it is possible that you want to extend the article with plug-ins, sites or simply additional information. In such scenarios, those old numberings would make no sense any longer.
Meta description is yet another crucial factor for search engine optimization. More insight about the page would be served for search engine bots with a relevant Meta description. It is recommended to use the targeted keywords in Meta title, description and keywords field as well. Insert them along with H1 tag. Using H1, H2, H3, etc tags with your heading would make you content more SEO friendly. Be careful about not using these heading tags too much since they can turn out the result as negative ranking due to improper headings.
Okay! What now?
Now that you have acquired enough knowledge about use and impact of keywords in context of SEO, you are now able enough to create a much profitable blog post or webpage using all the methods described above. All you have to do is to use keyword generators mentioned above and find five to six relevant keywords for your next blog post. These keywords should be acquired from a website or blog that falls under the same niche as yours. Then, simple write high quality and relevant content in which these keywords are targeted. This way, you can easily get a post / article that are embedded with the most trending keywords. After publishing it, there are plentiful of tools that can help you to track ranking of your own page.