How to use keywords in your blog?

Keyword research is an integral part of any SEO strategy. It is great if you already have done the keyword research and are ready with a focus keyword in your mind. But after you have that keyword what do you do next? Well, let us first talk about what most people do?

Some people just go crazy with the keyword and stuff it everywhere. They have it three times in their title and twenty times in their description. While keyword stuffing is an old and useless practice now if such a blog is read by the viewers they will not enjoy it. Whereas other people don’t have a strategy for it. They just insert the keywords for the sake of having them in their blog post. As a result, some posts do well while others don’t.

Any digital marketer or a proactive blogger knows that keywords play a crucial role in boosting the rank of your blog post on the search engines. However, you cannot insert them the way you want. While we all are aware of the fact that conducting proper keyword research is a must, many don’t know how to use keywords effectively while writing a blog in order to drive more traffic to your blog.

Hence, to make this easy for you, we at our Jacksonville SEO company have come up with some strategies on how to smartly use your keywords in your blog to help increase its SEO rankings and drive more traffic.

Best Practices to Insert Keywords Throughout the Blog

1. Incorporate Relevant Keywords in Your Title

Whenever you write a blog post, you must be spending a significant amount of time to come up with a creative title. Why? That is because the title plays a significant role in your blog to inform your users what your content is all about and captivate them. Similarly, having relevant keywords in your title will also help you improve your blog’s SEO rankings and thus bring more traffic. Hence, you should ensure to incorporate relevant keywords in your title.

Add the title tag that is related to the content you post and make sure you do not trick your viewers by writing a title that irrelevant to your blog. You can always rely on title generator tools to come up with suitable titles if you don’t know the most appropriate titles to use for your blog posts.

2. Insert your Focus Keyword in Your Headings and content

Placing keywords in your headlines and content is one of the smartest ways used to incorporate keywords in your blog. But while doing so, you have to ensure that their usage is not forced and they fit naturally. Make sure to not make it seem like you are driving your readers to focus on the keywords instead of the content.

Insert the keywords naturally in your headings and subheadings that include <h1>, <h2>, and <h3> HTML tags. Additionally, also insert relevant keywords in your content but be sure to incorporate them naturally. Try to diversify them in order to avoid keyword stuffing. Both these tactics will help the search engines to understand what your blog content is about.

3. Make Sure to Use Keywords in the First and Last Paragraph of Your Blog

While it is important to include your keywords naturally throughout your blog, you also need to follow some best practices when it comes to keyword placement to make your blog more SEO-friendly. One of those best practices is to include your keywords in the first and last paragraph of the blog.

First, place your keyword somewhere closer to the beginning in the first paragraph. This will give search engines as well as your readers to know what your piece of content is about. Similarly, try to include an instance of your keyword while writing the conclusion of the article. The goal here is to make your article SEO-friendly and help the search engines better understand your content and avoid any confusion.

4. Make Use of Related Keyword Phrases

While your focus keyword should be the focal point of your blog and the top theme presented, it is always wise to make use of the related keyword phrases instead of stuffing the same keywords and making your article unreadable for the users. Because too many keywords not only make your blog look like spam to search engines but also make it annoying to the users. Hence, make sure to use only one or two related keyword phrases if you wish to maximize your blog’s traffic. So, start digging up for additional keywords for which you would like to rank.

Inserting these phrases in your blog would not change the focus of your article but would rather boost up and fortify your focus or primary keyword’s presence. Additionally, using different keyword phrases will also allow your content to rank high with search terms. Thus, making the blog SEO-friendly. Just make sure that you don’t use these related keyword phrases in place of your focus keyword until you have used your focused keyword appropriately in the recommended places.

5. Insert Keywords Your Meta Descriptions

The texts that you read under each search result that a search engine throws up are termed meta descriptions. They can help you enhance your click-through rate because generally when people conduct a specific search online, they skim through the meta descriptions in order to ensure that they click the most relevant results. Hence having relevant keywords in these texts is a must. Apart from this, a meta description is one of the places that search engines look to crawl pages and identify what they are all about.

As a result, you should not only write the meta description that captivates your users and motivate them to click on your blog but also include keywords in it to increase rankings and thus generate more traffic.

6. Make sure to include your keywords in the URL

Including keywords in the URL is another smart way of inserting the keywords in your blog post to help the search engine identify what your content is about and thus rank your blog well. So, instead of writing your URL with just numbers and letters, rewrite it with readable content.

People usually tend to trust links that have readable content that is related to their search queries. Hence, when writing your URL, with the search engines, you should also focus on the users because it helps them to locate links much easier. Additionally, inserting keywords here is the best practice to inform your users what your blog is about. But make sure you don’t stuff them.

7. Ensure to incorporate keywords in the blog post comments section

Nowadays, the majority of blog posts have a comment section and if you have it too you should not ignore the opportunity of including the keywords here. It can also help you drive more organic traffic as well as increase your SEO rankings because readers mostly return to the blog where there is some kind of interaction, especially where their questions are answered.

So, you should take advantage of this opportunity and optimize your keywords when you reply to your reader’s comments. But make sure that you don’t fix the terms for the sake of filling them, keep it as natural as possible and ensure to incorporate relevant keywords in every comment that you respond to. Well, making use of long-tail keywords will be wise here which will also boost your SEO rankings.

8. Don’t Forget the Image File Names and Alt Text

It is imperative to insert relevant keywords on the images you include if you wish to increase your blog’s visibility. This is one of the tactics that can help you rank higher on search engines. While some SEO professionals emphasize including the focus keyword in the alt attribute, many also recommend to include in the image filename. We as a SEO company in Jacksonville would suggest playing it safe and include the keyword in both places when possible.

Just be careful while doing so because alt attributes not only exist to help people understand what is an image about when they cannot see it but also help the search engine crawlers make a sense of an image. As a result, you need to use the alt attribute in a way that explains what is actually depicted in the image. So, just don’t jam your focus keyword in the alt attribute especially when it has nothing to do with the picture and does not make any sense. It is great if you could skillfully incorporate the keywords into that explanation but if you can’t, just describing the image and moving on will be a better option.

Conclusion

When it comes to ranking your content in the search results, making use of the right keywords and placing them appropriately in your blog will make all the difference. Because search engines always rank blogs with relevant keywords especially when they are used well. You can also take help from Jacksonville SEO Company. Finally, it is necessary to make sure that you adjust your keyword targeting and optimization for the best results possible.