Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard the term “Search Engine Optimization” or SEO…I’m betting a good number of you have crossed paths with this terminology at some point. I’m also betting – even if you have a rudimentary understanding of what the term means – you are not sure what it means for you and your business.
In layman’s terms, SEO is basically the act of enhancing a website so it can be found more easily by people conducting an Internet search. I mean, after all, we are not going to all the trouble of setting up a site, buying a domain, setting up hosting, and making it live so that we can hear crickets, right? We actually want people to find it, for it to be relevant to them, and for them to begin to trust us/our company as a reputable resource (and, hopefully, buy our products/services, I imagine). That said, there needs to be a little bit of effort on our part to do our best to make that happen. One part of your on-site SEO strategy should include keywords and keyword planning.
Keywords are the words and/or phrases that people enter in the search box when they are looking for something. Keywords can be short – one or two words – or what are referred to as “long-tail” keywords – phrases of multiple words. Your interest will be in finding those keywords that people (more specifically, your target audience) are most likely to search when looking for what you’re offering on your site. The idea is then to incorporate those words into various parts of your site (headings, body text (particularly your blog posts), image descriptions, etc.), to increase the likelihood that your site turns up in those search results. The one caveat here is to be careful to avoid what is called “keyword stuffing”, which is essentially placing keywords all over the place, even in spots where they don’t really make sense. Search engines don’t appreciate that and you’ll likely be put on someone’s naughty list for this practice. In other words, use them in places where they fit naturally when you create your content and don’t use 50 of them on a page!
One of the easiest ways to search for keywords is through Google’s own suggestions – plugging in a search term or phrase and reviewing what other suggestions Google offers. For example, when I plug in the term that starts with “How do I bake a cake…”, Google makes a number of other suggestions of similar searches such as “How do I bake a cake without an oven”, “How do I bake a cake from scratch”, and “How do I bake a cake in a slow cooker”, among many others. Any one of these might be useful to you, depending on your content. These keywords may also give you other ideas of additional content to write that your audience may want to read!
In my next post in this series, I’ll discuss some other resources/methods for researching keywords and determining their value to your search strategy. Until next time!
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