WordPress SEO – Understanding Keywords

Many of the questions I received about WordPress SEO relate to keywords, so let’s dive into that topic. We’ll start at the beginning (and when we get to the end, we’ll stop, har har).

What’s a Keyword?

Keywords are the words people type into the search box at a search engine.

Yes, that’s it. That’s all they are. They’re small things, really. But oh, the power they hold! So much depends on them. Keywords form the basis of search results. Keywords form the basis for much of the web’s advertising. Keywords trigger much of the commerce online. Keywords are their own currency on the web, and they are worth actual dollars.

A keyword sounds like it should  just be one word, but they’re often more than one word. Here are some examples of keywords:

• blog coaching
• WordPress SEO
• problogger
• how to get traffic
• online business school review
• add a blog to a website

As you can see, only one of these is a single word, and some of them are more than several words. The more words there are in a keyword, the fewer but more specific are the results that will be returned in a search. These are also keywords people would expect to search on and end up at Remarkablogger.

I avoided keywords from other industries/fields because I don’t want to appear in search for unrelated words. I still to this day get searches for the word d-o-l-l-m-a-k-e-r because of a single post I wrote years ago.

Flipping Perspective

When considering WordPress SEO, you have to consider the keywords you want your blog to be found for (we say we’re targeting keywords). When writing a post for your blog, you have to consider what keywords you’re targeting for that particular post.

You may think you know the right keywords to target, but unless you’ve done some research, it’s likely you don’t really know. Incorrect assumptions about keywords can damage your bottom line considerably! How? The wrong keywords prevent your blog from being found by people.

You have to flip your perspective. You have to get inside the searcher’s head–or at least get out of your own head. One of the best ways to this that doesn’t involve “getting technical” is to empathize with a person who has a problem they’re trying to solve: how would they frame their question? What solution are they looking for? What words would they likely use? Then, write a post around those words.

Determining Keywords

There are a few free and easy ways to determine what your major keywords should be. Here are some of them:

1. Use the Google suggest box. When you search on Google, a drop-down appears that contains suggestions. These suggestions are aggregated from the millions of searches people do on Google every day. What you’re seeing there is a “best of” list of the most frequently searched keywords.
2. Use the Free Wordtracker Keyword tool. Wordtracker has a free and a paid version of their service. The free version is perfectly adequate for most people.
3. Use Google’s Free Keyword Tool for AdWords. Even if you’re not going to run a Google AdWords campaign, you can still use the free keyword tool to get an overview of the market around a keyword in terms of searches, ad spend, and clicks. If you make money from your blog by running Google AdSense, this tool can help you target keywords for post topics that will create a more profitable context for AdSense ads.
4. Analyze the top sites for your keywords. To be blunt, you can simply copy the successful tactics of other sites. Look at how a site writes its title tags and meta descriptions. Observe how its content is written and how keywords are used in it. Observe the site’s architecture and file-naming. Synthesize how the top sites do it into your own keyword/content/navigation strategy.
5. There are many other tools I could show you, but this should do it for an introductory post.

Keywords for WordPress SEO

You want to be targeting between 3 and 5 major keywords for your blog. By major, I mean that a healthy number of searches occur for these words every day (it’s relative, but your research will reveal general numbers). For example, blog marketing is a major keyword for me, but Using Twitter to grow blog traffic definitely is not. I may still be interested in it as a “longtail” keyword, but it’s not a major keyword.

Let’s apply this now to WordPress SEO: I strongly suggest you make these major keywords your blog categories, and that you set up your permalinks and robots/nofollow/noindex settings so that your blog permalinks always contain major keywords you want to rank for.

This is much more easily done for a brand-new blog than for an existing blog. Changing all the links on your blog without redirecting the old links to the new links will render useless any existing links to your blog from other sites (backlinks). However, it is possible to do this with the right WordPress plugins.

Keywords are not something you simply sprinkle into your blog posts. You can build your entire blog around them, starting with the domain you purchase and continuing with the URLs for each blog post.

Does this sound like something you’re interested in learning more about? More information and step-by-step instructions for how to do category-based SEO keyword permalinks are in WordPress SEO Secrets, my home study course on SEO for WordPress.