Using Keywords For Article Marketing

There are many methods to get more traffic for your website. One of the easiest ways to do this is to use keywords correctly in your text. Keywords are the words and phrases that people search on search engines to find the information they are looking for. The better you choose the keyword phrase, the more likely your website will be at the top of the search engines. Of course, how your website ranks will also depend on other factors, such as how much competition there is for a keyword phrase and how popular your site is in terms of link popularity.

There are several ways to find effective keywords for your website. I find the easiest is to use a keyword suggestion tool. The two keyword tools I would recommend are the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and WordTracker. Here’s a brief summary of each detailing how to use these keyword suggestion tools:

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a very useful tool that shows the keyword phrases you search for with the results of the number of monthly searches. The keyword tool in Google AdWords is completely free. To use it, type the topic for which you want to find keywords or keyword phrases. When using this free keyword suggestion tool, make sure you’ve selected ‘Descriptive words or phrases’ under ‘How would you like to generate keyword ideas?’ This way, you are looking for keywords used in search engines and not just on a specific website. You can have more than one keyword search idea at the same time, simply by entering different phrases on separate lines. Before you hit the ‘get keyword ideas’ button, you’ll need to enter the provided verification code to prove you’re not a ‘bot’.

Next, many results will be listed for the keywords. The Google AdWords tool provides the number of monthly searches as well as ‘advertiser competition’. Remember that the more competition there is, the harder it is to get your page to the top of the search engine results. Keyword phrases that contain more than three words are usually good choices because they tend to have less competition and the search is more specific, so it’s more geared towards the purpose of your website.

Once you’ve chosen your keywords based on a reasonable number of monthly searches without too much competition, copy and paste them into a Word document, ready to be included on your web page for maximum effect.

word tracker

WordTracker is the other keyword suggestion tool that I would recommend. This keyword suggestion tool works slightly differently than the AdWords tool in that it provides results for everyday searches. Retype the keyword idea and press the ‘Hit Me’ button and the results will be displayed. There is also a dropdown menu that gives you the option to remove offending or questionable results.

With the free version of WordTracker, only the top 100 keyword results are shown, since you have to pay to see the rest. The results that WordTracker gives are searches per day, so if you are comparing the results of the two keyword suggestion tools that I have mentioned, remember to take into account that one shows monthly searches and the other daily. You should also take into account the fact that WordTracker is based on a different database than the AdWords tool, so the results are difficult to correlate.

Again take note of the keywords you want to use on your web page.

How to use keywords on your website

Choose a primary keyword phrase and a secondary keyword phrase to use on your page. In some paragraphs you will want to use variations of these instead of the exact phrase.

Title

The most important place to include keywords is the title of your page. You should put your best keyword at the beginning of the title. Let’s see an example. If you’re building a page about cake decorating, here are keywords you might want to consider:

682 cake decorating ideas
540 cake decorating
375 cake decorating supplies
155 cake decorating techniques
106 tips for decorating cakes
20 Cake Decorating Designs
8 easy cakes to decorate

(daily search results)

Typically, you would focus on a single keyword phrase in the title, so your page title might be, for example, “Cake Decorating Tips on Using Icing.”

The content of your page

When including keywords in your content, you should have at most one keyword per paragraph. If you include crazy keywords, then Google may ban your site. Including an excessive number of keywords is called “keyword stuffing.” Google has a way of pinpointing sites that do this, and this can result in banning all of their web pages. The paragraphs further down your page don’t need your keyword phrase at all, but it’s a good idea to include it in your last paragraph. Your secondary keyword phrase should be used even more sparingly.

When keywords are used effectively, they can be the key to getting more traffic, so give it a try the next time you write a new web page!