Keywords are the terms and phrases in your posts that are most relevant to your topic. For instance if you are posting in your blog about a healthy food product, then your keywords will of course be the product name. But don’t stop there; keywords will also include the product category, the product ingredients, and can also include the ways you can use the product.

Your ultimate objective with keywords is to make a connection between your content and the terms your customers are searching for. While many customers search for generalized terms, some search for very specific terms. When you stick with the generalized terms on your site, you are competing with a million other sites for those terms. However, when you make your terms more specific, you reduce the number of competitors and open the door for more attention, albeit from a smaller crowd.

The wisdom follows that you would like to get more interest from a smaller, more focused set of customers than from a very small portion of a larger but less focused set. Would you rather be fishing with a big net in the ocean, or a small net in a barrel chock full of exactly the fish you like?

Let’s talk about a few ways you can optimize your keywords…

Keyword modifiers can help distinguish your product from a competitor’s, or can help refine your search for a more specific term. For instance you may add the word ‘chewable’ or ‘drink’ to your product name to help distinguish its specific product type. Adding words like ‘healthy’ or ‘natural’ can help refine search results for people looking for specific categories.

Modifiers are intended to make your keywords more specific, and thereby reduce the number of competing terms.

Associative Keywords are keywords that are related to your keywords, but that may not be precisely related to your product. For instance if you are selling a healthy food, you will want to add keywords that relate to proper digestion or good nutrition. These types of words will come naturally in your discussion, but it helps to be aware of them so that you can concentrate on using them in slightly more density than you might otherwise.

As you contemplate your keywords, don’t forget to consider misspellings or alternate spellings. If your keywords are hard to spell, or have a common alternative, intermingle these in your post to help the search engines identify your content with what your type-challenged customers may be entering into the search window.

Finally, remember to use localization terms with your keywords. The search engines are including localization tags in all their search results, meaning that it matters where you are from and where you are selling. Localized search results are relatively new and many users are only just catching on; this is a great way to get ahead of the curve and take advantage of local searches for your product. To add localization to your keywords, simply add the name of your city, state, and zip to your keywords.

Keep your keywords in mind as you write in your blog, on Facebook and Twitter. Optimize everything you write so that as the search engines index content from these sources, they know exactly how to match you up with the customers searching for your products.

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Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

1. Research
2. Creative writing
3. Linking

Before we get into those, let’s talk about ‘why’.

Keywords are basically the anchor text of your article that help readers, and search engines, determine your relevance. In terms of ‘relevance’, there are no wrong answers; you are not trying to be relevant to a common standard. Rather, you are trying to be relevant to your own chosen topic.

For instance; If you are writing about ‘humanitarianism’, you will want your keywords to be relevant to the subject of ‘humanitarianism’. Relevant terms could be ‘philanthropy’ or ‘charity’. Conversely, you will want to avoid a concentration of key words that are not relevant such as ‘Brittany Spears’ or ‘horseback riding’. Unless, of course, your humanitarianism involves giving a horse to Brittany, but you get the picture.

It all has to do with ‘relevance’. Relevance is how closely related your keywords are to the subject you most want to be indexed for in the search engines. As the search engines scour your post for relevant keywords, they will choose the predominant topics and use those to index your article. In this way, a reader can find you when they search for ‘humanitarianism’ in a search engine. The key for you is in making the relevant keywords within your article easy to identify. The easier it is for a search engine to determine the keywords in your article, the more prominent you will be in the search results for your given topic.

Research

One of the most daunting tasks in effective blogging is in finding the most appropriate keywords. It’s not that hard, but does take a little ‘know-how’.

The first steps in your research are to determine the subject of your article, to outline topics, and to write down your assumed keywords. Assuming keywords is easy; just imagine what your audience might type into a search engine in hopes of finding your specific article.

Next, you’ll want to conduct some scientific research to confirm your choices, or to find viable alternatives.

A great tool for this task is found at http://google.com/keywords . The keyword research tool at Google is as good as any, and takes advantage of Googles remarkable collection of data. Once you enter your assumed keyword idea in their form, and get past the annoying-but-necessary captcha, you’ll be presented with a spreadsheet of data that now requires some study.

Listed in order of relevance, with the most relevant term at the top, you will see a list of related terms with information about how much competition there is for the term, and how many local searches and global searches have been conducted on the term in the last month.

Your job now is to find keyword alternatives that have a good balance of competition vs hits. The higher the competition value, the more the keyword is used in other blogs and the lower the chances are for you to stick out among the crowd. High competition keywords are tempting because of the high number of hits they usually receive. However you may do better by selecting a low competition term and shooting for a greater piece of a smaller pie. You don’t necessarily need to avoid high competition terms, so long as you are working in the lower competition ones, too.

Note that further down in the spreadsheet you will find a list of alternative terms that may help in your creative writing exercise.

Creative Writing

Perhaps the most difficult step in your effort to incorporate keywords, creative writing now requires that you come up with a story, and develop the ability to include terms in an appropriate density. You’ll want to include as many as 10 percent keywords to your SEO copywritng. Tricky, but over time it becomes second nature. Ten percent may be a bit too much for some articles, so shoot for a minimum of five percent.

It is also important to maintain ‘human readability’. The search engines understand language, grammar, and punctuation, so you will want to pay attention to these important aspects of writing to avoid appearing as spam and receiving an index penalty. Write your article in natural language, and use keywords as often as you can without creating lists or appearing to be blatant.

Be sure to modify your keywords with localization as well as with descriptive terms. There are two ways to modify your keywords;

1. With a descriptive modifier, so that if our primary keyword is ‘humanitarian’, we can say ‘humanitarian relief’ to make it a stronger keyword phrase.
2. With a localization such as ‘Miami Humanitarian’, which helps the search engines localize my search index for people within the Miami area searching for the term ‘humanitarian’.

Localization has become one of the most important aspects of keyword usage because of the mobile revolution, where people search from a mobile device to find local products and services. The search engines have responded with more localized search results and listings. You can take advantage of this simply by adding the name of your town in front of a keyword.

Keyword Linking

Finally, be sure to link your keywords to appropriate pages around your site, or to an appropriate page on your home site. A few rules of thumb to consider include:

Don’t link excessively. In a 300-word article it is appropriate to link 3-4 keywords. More and you will appear to be spamming, and will dilute the authority you are giving to each keyword. (Authority is a measurement of strength based on the relevance of the article.)

Don’t link a specific keyword more than once; no need to waste authority on the same keyword. Keep it simple for the search engines to follow, and don’t waste their time by leading them to the same place from the same keyword multiple times.

Use alternate tags to add information to your links. This is a great way to help the search engines understand more clearly your terms and their specific modifiers.

I talked about keywords in this week’s tech call with Paul Jensen. Here’s an excerpt if you’re the listening type: