Keywords & Content

I have mentioned the importance of keywords in my website in a few posts. Here, I want to explore them a little deeper and help any new people understand why they are important but should not be the sole focus of your content.

In the Wealthy Affiliate Online Entrepreneur Certification (OEC) training, Kyle explores how finding keywords relevant to your chose niche can be used to build content. Keywords or keyword phrases are the terms entered into search engines.

To be found by users, you have to create content that draws readers’ attention. Google, Bing & Yahoo! crawl sites looking for informative, entertaining and/useful content. Technically speaking, every word you write could be a keyword. This is one of the reasons why stuffing your posts with a single keyword can work against you.

I recently posted two reviews for an indie author. The books I reviewed were in the Urban Fiction genre, which is keyword I wrote the articles around.

When the posts were indexed and ranked on the first page of all three major search engines, it was not the under the keyword I focused on. They ranked under the author’s name, Tabitha Sharpe.

So far, I have not seen them rank under the keyword I chose. Even though I built the post around one keyword, because the content was thorough, it was indexed and ranked under another keyword I included.

The author’s name is a peripheral keyword to Urban Fiction. It is related but not the proposed focus. Despite that, it wound up in the top 10 on page one of Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. That is where we want to be.

Considering that there are millions, perhaps billions of new pages, posts and content going live every day, staying on page one is quite an accomplishment, and these reviews were up there for about a week.

This is why we need to continue to create engaging content. Unless we happen to hit the nail on the head with a pile driver, someone else is going to outrank us eventually.

Below is a link to a Keyword training video by Kyle. It helps immensely when it comes to selecting a good keyword to build your content around.

The training at WA broadened my mind on keywords. I was trained to use it as often as I could fit it in, in essence “stuff” my content. That was in 2013-2014. These days, search engines are smart enough to know the difference between quality content and stuffed content.

The difference is day and night. I no longer struggle to incorporate adequate keyword density. I write using it naturally within the context of the article. This makes writing that much more enjoyable for me and allows me to let my creative juices flow more freely.

I’m sure this is true for anyone with prior content creation training. Before WA, I worked at an online paper. I can understand why they wanted a certain density on the keywords. Competition for readers is tough, especially for a newspaper.

As I mentioned, that was years ago. With every update to search engine algorithms it becomes more challenging to rank. That is, if you are doing it wrong, or trying to cheat or trick the system.

Here are WA, we are taught to do things right. We are taught to deliver helpful content that keyword in a natural manner. So those updates, while they may put a temporary dent in our organic traffic, are not harmful to our overall viewership in the long run.

Thanks for stopping by!

Gwendolyn J