How to figure out the KEYWORD enigma
In your time on the internet I’m sure you have heard stuff like SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, maybe you’ve even heard of SEM, Google algorithm and Pagerank!
But the simple basis for all of this is the term – keyword. What will those users search and find you? You don’t want people searching “how to bake a cake?” and getting your blog, right? You want them to stay and get the quality content you deliver for the term they searched, thereby cutting out high-bounce rates and sucking in new followers.
And it all comes down to the right keywords.
So, how do you choose the right keywords? How do you narrow down which one’s to use?
This is where KEYWORD RESEARCH comes in, something that you can do on a daily basis or do it whenever you feel like it. Companies will spend hours daily one keyword research, or pay companies to do it for them.
Here are few quick tips when you are trying to narrow down keywords to use:
- Describe your blog. What are terms used in your description? Book Blog? Paranormal book blog? Romance book blog? Movie review blog? Those keywords are a good place to start.
- Check out Google’s AdWords, keyword research tool – and get some ideas. You will have to sign up for an AdWords account, but you don’t have to buy anything. Google will give you suggestions based on the categories you select.
- Use your current incoming traffic as a guide, what are they searching for already and finding your blog (THAT YOU APPROVE OF!), expand on the keyword and use it.
- Once you have a list of keywords, search using those keywords and see what you get. What you think is a great keyword, might be a HIGH traffic keyword, or something that returns the “wrong” type of content.
- Before implementing the keywords, make sure you deliver on the results of those keywords. You don’t’ want people to search those keywords and come up short.
Suggested General Keywords for Book Blogs:
Look Under the Hood
Keywords for this post: book blogger tutorials, book blog, blog tutorial, book blog how to, keyword research
, keyword research for book bloggers
Question of the Week
“I have business cards with my website on it (www.thebrokenshelf.wordpress.com) and if I buy a domain & webhosting through godaddy.com – if people type in the URL with the wordpress.com on it will it direct them to the new site or will I have to get new business cards made?
Thanks! and I LOVE your site!” – The Broken Shelf
Thanks so much! This is a simple fix – and you would just use something called a redirect, which is something you want to do, even if you DIDN’T have business cards made. WordPress.com offers a paid redirect service. It is $13 a year. Just click on the Store tab in your dashboard.
Have a question? Ask it here.
Thank you for answering my question! 🙂
Dumb question…to use keywords, do I just need to include the words on my blog or in my posts? Or is this where tags come in? (sorry, that was 2 questions, huh?) 🙂
As an example, I have a plugin that lets me generate keywords that places them in the meta tags for each of my post pages. This is WordPress. Then, I try and use those same keywords in a heading, the title of the post, and throughout the content. You want to do a good saturation of keywords throughout the post. Linking these keywords also helps with SEO. 😀
It may be worth considering that most big search engines (for example, Google) don’t actually look at the keywords in meta data. They do look at and use the title and description, but they don’t consider the keywords in the meta tags when ranking you because people were abusing/spamming them in the past to get higher rankings.
But using the keywords in the title/description/post is still definitely worthwhile. 🙂
Great tips. I always forget about SEO. Might have to look at this on the weekend to get better results. 🙂
Don’t worry, so do I!
I always forget about keywords, metadata, tags in terms of SEO stuffs. Sadly looking at my dashboard and seeing what search terms land people on my site are either spot-on (my blog’s name), illegal downloads of books, or people looking for “young” people pics or pics of books. Of course I get the occasional search for Du Shaunt, but that’s their bad for not realizing a book blog isn’t a dancer.
I always love your helpful tips posts. I really need to start implementing.
I used to have this SEO plugin that gave me a Good or Bad rating per post or page — and I always got bad lol. That boy might win the show too, girl — then you’ll have tons of his traffic lol.
Oh that would depress the heck out of me. LOL. Yeah I think my ignorant bliss is the best way for me to go. 🙂 And if he does win, maybe I’ll have to create a nemesis post 🙂
EXCELLENT article chick. I’ve resisted signing up for Adwords since I never fully understood it and didn’t research it, but I’m totally going to now.
Thanks hun…you don’t have to do any advertising, it just has that good feature for keywords.