The power of 'ing'!

bygquinlan

264 followers

11 years ago

Ok, let's do a show of hands. Anyone here know what a gerund (g pronounced j) is?

No, not many hands, just as I thought.

Well, I'm going to tell you. And I've just used one.

Some of you might have guessed already from that little clue. Here it is - a gerund is a word ending in 'ing'.

"So what?" I hear many of you say. "Thanks for that fascinating morsel of trivia."

Well, it's not as trivial as you might think, 'cos not everyone uses 'how to...' when finding out how to do something.

When people are developing keyword phrases in their heads as they contemplate googling their latest home repair project, or a recipe for olive bread, or the best way to keep hydrangea flowers blue, many of them will phrase the verb as a gerund.

So, in these examples, you get 'repairing cracked plaster', 'baking olive bread' and 'keeping hydrangea flowers blue' as search phrases.

If you're writing instructional content, you will naturally break the text up with headings. Using gerunds in those headings 'Keeps It Simple Stupid' for both you and the reader.

So, 'preparing the crack', 'creating a good crust' and 'making the soil acid' would be great headers in our three little niches.

Got it? A simple concept but one that is easily overlooked. Try applying it to your keyword meta and content. It will probably open up more keywords than you had previously, keywords that people are using all the time and customers that you're missing.