Increase SEO Keywords in your Posts
Part of keeping up with the blog and keeping our readers informed involves some deep dives into Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We have a lot of conversations with our clients about SEO keywords and SEO strategy in general. One important aspect of writing with SEO in mind is understanding that while you’re writing about one topic and one primary keyword, you need to include some variety in implementing that keyword.
Variety is the Spice of SEO
If you’re like us, you’re probably using a plugin like Yoast SEO to help you with your SEO efforts. Yoast does a great job of showing you areas to improve your posts. The plugin has an area where you can define related keyphrases right in the page editor. It exists because there may be several ways of providing the same keyword content in the natural course of conversation. For example, “increase SEO keywords” or “add more SEO keywords”. These both basically mean the same thing. This is good for your readers as it flows much more naturally. Since it’s good for your readers, it’s good for your SEO and Google recognizes that.
Following through Naturally
So whenever you’re working the SEO for a page you’re asked to connect to your keyword phrase in several ways. You want your keyword to show up in your page title, your H2 (and lower) headings, and at several points throughout your page content. Making this work with the exact same keyword phrase is very rarely going to seem natural. Providing these alternate, related keywords is going to help make this much more organic for your readers. Despite wanting the keywords in the right areas, Google wants the content to be human readable above all other considerations.
Quality not Quantity
Google won’t care if your keyword is used 88 times in the article if the article doesn’t have supporting content around that keyword. What you write needs to be researched and well structured. When writing about a specific subject you’re going to use additional supporting terms that are related to the topic. These are more organic indicators for your audience (and Google) that you are writing useful information. It also helps differentiate your content from similar but unrelated content. For example, we often write about web development, but we write about it as providers of a service as opposed to educators. The related terms in our posts differentiate our content from a college or online course.
Watch out for Pesky Duplicate Content
You’re trying to provide content to users in a new way, something that hasn’t been presented before. You’re doing research, but you need to have a new angle on what you uncover. Avoid regurgitating other writer’s ideas. Here’s an example. With this post we’re talking about SEO, but we weren’t trying to write an exhaustive article on SEO (which can be a great approach to writing for the web). Our focus was on pointing out how you need to utilize groups of related keyword phrases to make the most out of your keyword usage. Hopefully, what we’ve presented reinforces that focus and gives supporting evidence as to its value.
A Good SEO Strategy is Key
SEO is not an undertaking for the meek. There’s a lot of work involved in it. WordPress provides a great environment for creating SEO friendly content. Tools like Yoast help make the most out of WordPress-based SEO. But, SEO is an ongoing activity as opposed to a checklist item. The balance between keyword research, user intent, and search engine algorithms means things are changing all the time.
If you find yourself in need of some strategic help, please reach out. We provide a lot of SEO strategy for our clients.
Happy blogging.
