The importance of keywords
- Kaloyan Andreev
- May 4, 2019
- 4 min read
Updated: May 6, 2019
When we search on the web…
In our usual day-to-day activities we use the internet, it’s undoubtedly an inevitable activity in our daily lives. We type in the Google search bar to look for different things or services that suit our needs and intentions. Taking for example, we may search for the perfect places to spend a holiday, or we are looking to purchase a TV, a gaming console or any other piece of tech.
Or let’s say that we are looking of song to which we do not know the name of it, nor the artist singing it… what do we do in this situation? Since we don’t have any other choice we might as well just try to google the lyrics, right? And exactly at that moment when you press the Enter button the results from your search come in and you finally find the song that you were trying to find. Apparently, the lyrics that you have written on the search bar serve as keywords that have helped you finding the results you were searching for. And this is what I am going to talk about today. More specifically, I am going to elaborate the topic about keywords on how you should use them in your blog posts.
What are keywords?
Keywords are the main words that are related to your main content, be it in a video that you are uploading, or a blog post that you are writing about, website, etc. To sum up, the keywords are your main element in which you put a lot of emphasis and you hope that your audience associates your work with this keyword.
For example, if your content is mainly aimed at “social media marketing” you may say that you will use “social media” and “marketing” as main key words and everything will go well, right? Well… and yes and no… we have to get deeper in this.
Why are keywords important for your posts?
In its general essence, keywords are made for indicating people what the highlighted word is and the major role it plays, whether it is in a book, or when searching in Google , you name it. If you are considering starting up with your keyword, you must focus on a specific segment and you should carefully pay attention to the message you want to spread. Better yet, ask yourself, what do I want to inform the audience in my website? Will my audience use this keyword? Just simply using the main keyword is very biased and it won’t make it interesting, nor it will give a meaning to your post.
The first step is to analyze the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) volume of your keyword, you can find a lot of plugins on the google store such as SEOquake, Semrush, Yoast SEO and others. These plugins give you an analysis of a keyword and displays what is the search volume of it. The bigger the search volume, the more work is required to achieve higher rankings. In other words, if a given keywords has a lot of search volume, the more popular it is, thus indicating biased results most of the time. For example, you want to google “hamburger”, Google will automatically show you hamburger restaurants, Wikipedia articles about the burger, the search engine doesn’t know what your purpose was in searching this word. Maybe you wanted to order a burger? Maybe you wanted to cook one at home by yourself and search the recipes? Or you are searching for a burger restaurant?
The next step which you have to consider is adding additional keywords. Think of more keywords that should be used in order to empower the message of your blog post. Let’s use the same example with the term “social media marketing”.
As you can see, on the very bottom of the page, Google recommended more search alternatives for my search. You should not only use your main keywords as the primary element on your blog posts, consider adding more into it. By putting more keywords, this will make your posts more specific, concise, engaging, and you might gather a lot of visitor traffic.
Another point of advice in order to put emphasis on your keywords is adding relatable keywords to the more keyword. Maybe for “social media marketing” you could use something like “strategy”, “management” or whatever you think could be related to it.
Long-tail and Fat Head keywords
Regarding the value a keyword has, they can be classified as Long-tail, Chunky middle and Fat heads. Fat heads are the keywords that usually have the highest rankings, highest search volume and bring up the most popular results, the middle part is called the chunky middle. The long-tail keywords bring the less popular results, but on the flip side they contain specific and supportive information behind the main keyword.
EXAMPLE:
Fat head: Steve Jobs
Long tail: Apple's CEO's
To sum up first you must take into account to whom do you want to deliver your message, secondly think of the main keyword you will focus on, afterwards conduct research regarding the search volume in order to understand if it attracts a lot of traffic. As a final step add more keywords and write in a way that could engage your target audience.
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