Now that you know what type of keyword works, you can now learn how keyword-rich content can grow your internet business.
Where To Put Keywords For SEO
The first step is to find one or two keywords you want to target in an article. Some people target three to five keywords; you can try to do that, too, but you’re going to spread yourself so thin that you might as well have not tried to optimize for any keyword. Personally, I pick and write about a single keyword.
Writing high-quality content around a single keyword results in articles ranking for other related keywords around the topic. Search engines are now enhancing their algorithms so that contextually related keywords in the content are considered. Writing high-quality content increases the likelihood that people will share and link to your article. Search engines also look at the quality of websites that link back to your content when they consider how to rank your article.
Once you’ve decided the keyword you want to target, write a high-quality post around that keyword and aim for it to be better than anything else on the internet.
It sounds ambitious, but that should always be the driving force behind your writing. If you’re very familiar with the topic, then it’s time to show it. If you know the topic well enough but not enough to write “the best article ever,” then it’s time to do some research. Your goal should always be to create content that is more helpful than what anybody else has written. Aiming for anything less won’t do your business any favors.
High-quality posts don’t have to be very long. It’s possible to have excellent content that contains 1,200 to 1,500 words. All your articles need not be 5,000 words long. However, remember to be realistic: 300- to 500-word articles are likely not going to be the best quality posts on any topic. To be truly helpful, your content needs be detailed and discuss the topic extensively. That’s not possible with a 500-word article.
After you’ve written your post, you can then optimize it for your target keyword. This involves SEO, which I’ll discuss in more detail in a later lesson. Basically, we want Google and other search engines to notice your high-quality content, so we work to get them to do just that by being thoughtful about where to put keywords for SEO. SEO involves tweaking certain elements of a post, and it’s a bit too complicated to get into at this time. Just keep in mind that this is the next step after creating a post.
So, You’ve Published a Keyword-Optimized Post—Now What?
Now we wait.
In time, your website will build authority and start ranking for the terms you’re targeting. Building authority and search engine rankings doesn’t happen overnight. It’s possible to dedicate six to eight months finding keywords to write and publish great content for. Meanwhile, nothing’s happening to your traffic and you wonder if you’re doing everything correctly.
If you find yourself in this position and consider giving up, reread Lessons 3–5 and review the Mindset Training. It’s normal to get stuck in a rut at some points of your Internet Marketing journey. Internet Marketing is a challenging endeavor, just like any other business. Keep finding keywords and writing and optimizing posts and the results you’ve been aiming for will come.
Once that happens, new content will rank (including older posts). As your entire site’s authority builds, a lot of your content that formerly didn’t have enough authority will start to rank higher. Sometimes, especially when it’s high quality, your content will rank for keywords you didn’t even target or optimize.
Optimizing content for the right keywords brings in more traffic, which eventually brings in more money. Don’t lose sight of that.
What to Look for in a Keyword
I’ve talked extensively about finding keywords, but what characteristics should you specifically look for in a keyword?
At least 30 to 100 Searches a Month: anything less and you’ll need to write more content for more keywords. Anything more and you’ll have difficulty ranking those keywords. Keywords that have 30 to 100 searches a month hit a balance between the effort required to write content and the difficulty of ranking in search engines.
Lower Competition Keywords Are Preferable: exactly how to determine if a keyword is low-competition is a combination of different factors that I’ll discuss more in depth in a later lesson.
You can do keyword research every time you write a new article, but I prefer to do keyword research in chunks that will last at least a few weeks, or about six to 10 articles. When I run out of keywords, I go back and do another chunk of keyword research.
I’ve found that this is the most efficient way of conducting keyword research. Rather than spending several hours focusing on finding a single keyword, writing the article, then repeating the entire process again, I’ve found that it’s better to do keyword research in one go and focus time on writing the next several articles over the next few weeks.