Keywords – What, When, Where & Why?

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 at 4:00 pm

Reader: Can you give me a list of directories to submit my blog to?

Gayla: I’ve never used blog directories and some of my blogs have gotten fairly high on the search engines without them. I have focused on using the proper keywords and did just fine.

Reader: Is there any place I can go to learn more about how to use keywords?

Gayla: What I do for keywords is:

Watch Technorati to see what people are searching.

I use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find variations of keywords and phrases.

Example: Say you’re wanting to use the keyword HOLIDAY — the Adwords keyword tool will tell you all the variations of the word holiday in how it was searched recently. I personally try to utilize as many keyword combos as I can with searches of 1,000 or greater. You’d be surprised at just how many visitors you can pull in that way.

Go to the Google Blog Search and see what other blogs similar to yours may be writing about, how they are tagging etc.

Yahoo Buzz is another great place to watch to see what the movers and shakers in the search world are. Try to incorporate as many of those top search terms into your blog posts as you can and tag them as the keywords that are being searched.

Another tip I’ve found to help is by bolding out the keywords within your post. You don’t have to do this on every single occasion, but it does help to do it once in a while. In as much as your eyes will pause on the bolded words, so will search engines.

That’s not saying I’m totally against blog directories — it’s just that I’ve never found the need to spend my time submitting to them.

If someone has an opinion that supports directories, I’d love to hear it.

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