Sunday Morning SEO: Keywords Vs “Clever” Words
Sean Platt recently wrote about the power of keywords for Copyblogger. When he first started his business blog, he ignored keywords and just focused on developing a unique writing style. He got a lot of compliments for his writing but his blog was not making much money.
He switched his focus from “clever” writing to SEO writing by including keywords in his posts. The result was huge. He got more traffic and links and he made a lot of money.
The Trap of “Clever” Writing
There’s nothing wrong with developing a unique writing style for your blog. But if you overdo it and ignore keywords, you’ll miss out on a lot of search traffic.
My blog has a PageRank 1 but it routinely outranks the top sites in my niche, which have at least a PageRank 3 and employ many writers. I include keywords in my posts but the other sites don’t pay attention to them. They often have puns and pop culture references in their content, but those clever words are not being used by search engine users.
If they would just include keywords in their content, they could easily outrank me since they have many more backlinks.
In this interview, Alborz Fallah talks about outranking the top car sites in Australia by simply including car names in his post titles. The other sites were so clever with their writing that they didn’t even have car names in their titles! Talk about business fail. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that many car lovers are typing in car names in the search engines.
Hopefully my point is clear. Keywords make a big difference. By including them in your content especially in the titles, you can greatly improve your rankings and traffic.
Dee Barizo is the resident SEO geek. He used to work full-time for Sea Waves as a search marketer. He currently does freelance SEO work.
Just thinking a little bit about what you are doing can have huge paybacks! What is great, is that someone like Alborz (I have read about him elsewhere) can take on the ‘giants’ and win! All because he took the time to learn a little SEO and apply some commonsense.
Whenever I write a blog, I will always consider the keywords I want to optimise for and build them into the text.
excellent point on keywords in titles! have definitely worked for me. however, one should remember not to over-stuff the content, tags, category names, etc with focus keywords as well. thanks for sharing!
@ Sherry
Great point. There’s definitely a balance between using keywords strategically and spamming. I actually don’t focus to much on the main body text. I don’t think keyword density is much of a factor anymore.
I usually just include keywords in the title tag and URL. The title tag especially makes a huge difference. I think if bloggers would just add keywords in their post titles, they would see a big increase in search engine traffic.
Excellent article! Using the right keywords seems easy but it needs lots of research to identify them