Keywords & Content

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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

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Recent Comments

6

Great post, thanks for sharing.

Great post, Gwendolyn - thanks for sharing.
It's interesting that your articles didn't rank under the keyword that you used.
When you write lots of content by posting regularly to your website, you will naturally include other keywords in the body and natural flow of your content that the search engines will pick up on.
Even though these are not the actual keywords that you are using to rank your articles, they are still phrases that people type into the search engines.
Jay Neil's (Magistudios) most recent Friday live training illustrates it really well and it was a real eye opener for me. Here it is, in case you missed it Cheers
Rich :-)

Thank you, I actually did miss this one and I was a bit salty about it. I logged in to watch & hubby wouldn't stop talking to me, so I gave up :)

I'll check it out.
Thanks for stopping by

Gwendolyn J

Good evening my friend, everything you said is absolutely correct. All of my content for the last year has been indexed and a lot of it is on the first and second page. However I think what should be mention is you don't want to use that key word too many times within your article. my understanding from Kyle that could work against you. For some reason that Google and the rest of them frown on. And yes we can write articles that would be index without using those keywords however I think the chance of been index is a lot better by using the keyword but not over using it. May you have a beautiful successful week.

Thank you :)

That's the point I was making. Keywords matter but not as much as they used to.

Ranking is no longer about how many times you can use a keyword, it is now about how good is your content around that keyword.

Take care,

Gwendolyn J

Exactly, I am 1,000% with you on that one, everyone needs to understand this.

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