SEO Tips for Beginners: What are Keywords?

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SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) works in two key ways; offsite and onsite and is the process of optimising your site so it appears for certain terms in search. You can largely optimise your site by making sure that it’s relevant to the sectors you want your blog to appear for, and part of the way you do this is by identifying ‘keywords’ in your niche through keyword research.

How do you choose your SEO keywords?

There are a few ways you can identify keywords. The first, and often most effective way is to put yourself into the shoes of your potential audience. Who exactly do you want to be looking at your site, and what do you think they’ll be looking for? Sit down and search! See who comes up and what they’re sites are like while you’re at it- you may well pick up some interesting tips.

Google Adwords is the best tool you can use for the next stage, it will give you the volumes of the keywords you’ve come up with and will also suggest new ones. This will prevent you from focusing on keywords which have a very low search volume and won’t benefit you hugely.

How can you use your keywords for SEO?

Once you’ve got your keywords together it’s time to start using them. For this example we’ll say you want your blog to appear for ‘UK recipe blog’.

Firstly, if you want your blog to start appearing for a term like ‘UK recipe blog’ your blog will actually have to have a great deal to do with UK recipe blogs! This may sound simple, but plenty of people chase keywords that they think will have a high search volume although they have very little to do with their sites. This is a mistake! Not only because it’s incredibly difficult to do as you’ll have a hard time getting Google to rank you for irrelevant terms, but because if you’re blog isn’t what people are searching for they’ll leave your site immediately anyway!

Google needs to know that the content you have on your blog is going to be what people are looking for, so the best thing that you can do is create great quality content that’s really relevant to your keywords. To use our example, creating a ‘top 10 UK recipe’ blog list would be a very good idea; because it’s relevant content which people are likely to share!

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3 Responses to SEO Tips for Beginners: What are Keywords?

  1. Internet Marketing GURU February 27, 2014 at 7:26 am #

    These tips and advices are really very much effective for the beginners, I really like the tips provided by the blogger regarding SEO. Thanks for sharing.

    Reply
  2. Ataur Rahman March 29, 2014 at 12:06 pm #

    Thank you very much for this tutorial. This post is equally important and is the very useful for all bloggers.

    Reply
  3. John January 31, 2015 at 1:16 pm #

    Good tips. If you’re using WordPress, there are a few plug-ins which allow you to do this easily and improve your SEO. I use All in One SEO, https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ and there is another well known one called Yoast.

    Reply