Never believe a person when he says he is an expert in writing SEO articles. There are hundreds of things to look at. By the time you master one aspect of SEO writing, you find that the benchmark has changed. You have to start afresh to match up to it. One of the most important aspects of writing is the use of SEO Keywords. We shall look at ways to optimize your SEO article writing skills. This article can help SEO article writers to know how to insert their keywords in their articles.
The Concept of Keywords in SEO
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What is the main objective of writing an SEO friendly article? It is very obvious that you wish your article to rank on the first page of the search engines like Google, Bing, etc. After all, who searches on the second page? This is the reason why you have this famous quote, “The Best Place to Hide a Dead Body is Page Two of Google.”
How do you manage to achieve this objective? The intelligent use of SEO keywords in articles can help you do so. You must have heard of terms like ‘keyword density’, ‘use of H1, H2 tags’, and use of keywords in Meta Description’, blah, blah, blah. These are all important aspects of keywords we will discuss in brief.
The main concept is to acquaint you with the use of keywords for your article. You need to use your keywords intelligently. You will understand the same as we progress through this article. Our sole aim is to educate you how to write SEO friendly articles.
How To Insert SEO Keywords
1. Keyword Density
What is keyword density? You will hear a lot about this term in SEO. In very simple terms, keyword density is the number of times your keyword/keyword phrases appear in the article. This can determine the optimization of that particular page in the search engines.
What is the ideal keyword density? The acceptable norm is anything between 1% and 4%. If the keyword density is around 3%, it is absolutely perfect as per SEO norms. Anything above the 4% mark can be detrimental to your interests. It can term your article as a keyword stuffer thereby resigning it to the inner pages. A keyword density checker can determine the density easily.
Secondly, it is important to use the keywords so as to flow along with the article. This brings us to the topic of keyword research. Let us see what we mean by this term and its applications.
2. Keyword Research
Understand that “Google watches People.” Hence, it is better that you watch the trends as well. Updating your skills to match the current tends is very important in any aspect of life. This is true in this field as well. In the earlier days, you were free to write your content and subsequently insert the keywords. The 2012 Penguin Update changed this concept upside down. Now, you have to do the Keyword Research for Content Creation before attempting to write the article. You can make use of tools like Google Adwords tool.
3. Use of Header Tags
Every article should have a heading. You expect people to know what you are writing about. Having an interesting heading can make people curious. It will make people want to read your article. Inserting the right kind of keywords in the heading is very important. Make your heading as catchy as possible. For example, “Man bites dog” is a catchier headline than “Dog bites Man.” Such a heading will make people want to read what is there in your article. This is more like winning half the battle. SEO article writers should note to use the principal keyword in the header tags. It is better to use H1 tags for the title and H2 tags for the sub-headings. You can use subheadings within your subheadings. Under such circumstances, making use of H3 tags is advisable.
Google and other search engines pay great attention to subheadings. Using your secondary keywords in the subheading can be very useful. This can attract the search engine. Hence, the question of hiding the dead body does not arise. Your article can find a place on the first page of the search engines.
4. Keyword insertion
Stuffing your articles with keywords for the sake of stuffing them is sure to take you nowhere. The search engines can make it out within seconds. Google can penalize you heavily following which you might find it difficult to rank the article on the search engine.
Hence, the best way to go about it is to include the keywords in your title. It can also find a mention once in the first 300 words of your article. Try to use variations of your keywords. One example can be to alternate between the use of words like ‘television’ and ‘TV’. This is because people like to use abbreviations while searching for the content. Hence, it makes sense to watch people.
Secondly, you should the SEO keywords in articles in such a way that it flows along with the article. People should not feel that the same is being stuffed inside. It is better to use LSI keywords. These are simple keywords but at the same tine very powerful. Let us take the simple example of the word ‘orange’. Now, orange can be a fruit or a color. If you use keywords that indicate taste, the search engines can determine that your article is about the ‘orange fruit’. Hence, it will rank the same accordingly.
5. Edit what you write
Do you like to read the bad content? The answer has to be in the negative because no one likes to do that. Your article should appear aesthetically pleasing. You have self-editing programs like Microsoft Office Word that can point out your basic errors such as spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, incorrect usage of words, etc. Hence, editing what you write is necessary. This is the main concept of SEO Copywriting.
Aligning the text is very important. At the same time, highlighting the keywords is equally important. Avoid writing very long sentences. You might be grammatically correct but your aim is not to confuse the readers. The use of punctuations is very important.
6. Keyword Placement
This is a very important aspect of writing SEO friendly articles. Where do you place the keyword? To borrow a cricketing term, we can say “find the gaps to perfection’. Hitting the ball in the gaps between the fielders can get you maximum runs. You shot might be beautiful to watch but if goes straight to the fielder, it does not serve any purpose. Similarly, keyword placement is important. It does not matter if you use fewer keywords but placing them right is essential.
Where do you place the keywords? This is a good question in many ways. You can do so in the title, descriptions, headline tags, link tags, the body of the article, alt tags, URLs, and the ‘insert comment here’ tags. You want people to notice your keywords. Inserting them at these places can help.
7. Keyword Proximity
The search engines are a smart lot. They have their own algorithm that can help influence you. We shall take a simple example of the keyword ‘home loans’ and compare it with the keyword ‘home mortgage loans’. These two keywords might look very similar but notice the proximity of the word ‘home’ to the word ‘loans’. Hence, if a person searches for the term ‘home loans’, the citation ‘home loans’ will outrank the citation ‘home mortgage loans’. The search engines assume that you are searching for home loans alone. This is a very important point to note when you write SEO articles with keywords.
8. Keyword weight
This is a very important aspect as well. It refers to the ratio of the number of keywords on the page to the total number of words on the page. Some search engines give importance to this factor as well. You can increase the keyword weight by decreasing the number of words on the page. This can place greater emphasis on your keyword.
The Concept of Word Stemming
Google uses this particular concept. This concept allows for returning all forms of the keyword such as singular, plural, and verb forms when you search for a particular word. Let us see the example of the keyword ‘house plans’.
The search engine will optimize all the variations of the word such as ‘house plan’, ‘house planner’, and ‘house planning’ etc. Hence, one can use such variations of the keyword in the article. This can form part of keyword research’ as well.
Final Words
Keywords are important but one should not overuse them in any way. Google is watching every action of yours. Doing something silly can be detrimental to your overall objective. Using SEO keywords in articles is an art. You have to master this art to be successful in your broader objective of writing SEO friendly articles.
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