Blog SEO: Choosing Your Keywords

If you have a blog you and you wish to get more traffic you should know by now that even though content is still king there are other things you also need to pay attention to in order to get the amount of traffic you want. The other things I am talking about is of course SEO.

One of the most basic things you need to know about search engine optimisation is that it all revolves around the search terms that users enter when looking for information using both generic search engines and blog search engines. In order to be searchable by users the search term they enter must appear in your blog, otherwise you will not appear in the search results pages. What this means is that if you wish to rank well for certain search terms these search terms will be the ones that will be considered as your blog’s keywords.

Choosing you keywords can be pretty tricky since most blogs cover a very broad topic. The important thing to do then is narrow down your keyword choice and decide which will be your primary keywords. You can do this by figuring out your blog’s theme and the main categories that you have chosen. For example in this blog the main categories are:

Blog Tutorials News
Design and Themes
Featured Articles
Marketing and Search Optimization
Monetization
Software and Widgets
Writing

Good primary keywords for Blog Tutorials based on these categories would include: blog tutorials, blog tips, blog design, blog themes, blog marketing, search engine optimization, monetization, blog software, blog tools, blog widgets.

Aside from these keywords there are lots more I can think of on the fly, however, to narrow down your choices what you should do is list down ALL the keywords/phrases you can think of and then choose the ones you want to specifically target as your primary keywords.

On my next post I will discuss how some tools will make the task of choosing keywords a bit easier for you.

Originally posted on March 16, 2008 @ 11:04 pm