SEO Keywords: How To Find & Use The Best Keywords For A Site

Keyword research and optimization is a major building block for progressive SEO. Here are some tips to help you find and use keywords effectively. An SEO professional must know how to find the best keywords and use them selectively on a web page. Strategically using organic keywords on websites can improve ranking in search engines significantly.

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What are SEO Keywords?

SEO keywords are keywords or phrases on the pages of your site that correlate with what people are searching for on search engines. Keywords perform three roles:

• Helps users find resources on the internet based on their searches.

• Helps search engines fetch results from multiple web resources based on search queries.

• Helps websites gain organic traffic from search engines based on appearance on search engine results pages (SERPs).

When you understand how the above connects, you will realize why websites lack traffic when there is no strategic keyword optimization.

Keywords Types

There are two types of keywords, long-tail and short-tail keywords.

How to Find Keywords

Finding the best keywords is not difficult if you know what you are looking for, and have access to the best SEO keyword tools. Before you begin your keyword research, you should have an idea or a topic in mind. It can be based on an industry or a subject area.

Use content suggestion tools

The first thing you can try is to type your idea on Google and watch out for what the search engine suggests while you are typing. Google’s Autocomplete will show suggestions based on related search terms, and those suggestions can help you discover more terms for your keyword search.

When you have gathered the ‘ideal’ search terms, you can use Answer The Public to further generate additional ideas for the keywords, based on popular searches on the internet. The tool will give you several suggested topics that can help you refine your keyword ideas.

Use keyword tools to analyze

When you have found a set of keywords, the next thing to do is to analyze them to know their search metrics such as search volume, difficulty, etc. For this, you can use keyword finder tools such as Ubersuggest, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, KWFinder, Keywordtool.io, Google Keyword Planner, etc.

When you enter a keyword into the search bar of any of the tools, it returns results for the specified keywords and relevant ones. The tools also display the websites that are currently ranking top for the keywords. You need to consider the location in your keyword analysis if your product or service is region-specific. Select specific regions or countries so that your result can reflect the realities in your target area. If you don’t have a specific region you are targeting, use the global search parameter.

Important Keyword Metrics

Important keywords metrics to pay attention to include the following:

Keyword Search Volume

Keyword search volume is the number of searches a keyword is expected to receive within a period. It is calculated per month based on past search records for that keyword in search engines. Before you target a keyword, you must know its potential in contributing to website traffic.

Search Trends

Search trends indicate the growing trend or otherwise of a chosen keyword term. The trend helps to decide which keywords to select concerning their search volume and current trends. Tools like Google Trends, Exploding Topics, etc can help you identify trending topics.

Search Difficulty

Keyword difficulty or SEO difficulty is a measure of how easy or hard it is to rank top for a particular keyword. It is based on the number of other sites contending for the top spot. It is indicated on a scale of 0 - 100 and the lower the value, the easier to rank 1st in SERP.

How to Optimize Keywords on a Web Page

Finding the best keywords is half of the work, using the chosen keywords appropriately is what matters most. For your content to rank well in search engines, your keywords should be placed in strategic positions on your webpage.

Use Keywords in Header Tags

Use your focus keyword in your header tags: H1, H2, and H3 tags. H1 tag is used for the page title and it can only appear once in a page. H2 and H3 tags are used to give page content the structure that enables search engines to gather context for your page. You should include your focus keyword in your H1 tag and at least once in H2 or H3 tags.

Use Keywords in Meta Description

Meta tags are structured data that help search engines to identify the key information about the content of a web page. They are not visible to users on the page but they can be seen in the page source code and when they appear in SERPS. Include the keyword once in your meta title and meta description.

Use Keywords in Body

Include the focus keyword at least once in the body of your content, and this should be within the first 100 words of your text. Subsequent use of the keyword in the text can occur naturally, based on their relevance to the text.

Use LSI Keywords in Text

LSI is the short form of latent semantic indexing, and it refers to keywords or search queries that are semantically related to your focus keyword. LSI keywords are alternative words you can use in place of your main keyword in the body of your text to give stronger contextual information to both users and search engines.

These LSI keywords also have their useful metrics as with the main keyword, and Google can recognize them on web pages to boost ranking. You can use the LSI graph to find alternative keywords and include them in your text.

Besides their usefulness for page ranking, LSI keywords also help to avoid keyword stuffing (overuse of keyword). Keyword density should be between 1 - 2% of your entire text, therefore use alternative LSI keywords to boost SEO on a page.

Optimize Images

Optimize the images on your web page by using the ‘alt image tag.’ The alt tag provides alternative texts to search engines for your images, and this helps to rank your page better. Provide alt tags and descriptions for your images as this can earn your website additional traffic in image searches.

Conclusion

For your SEO strategy to yield desired results, focus on finding keywords that are popular, and have a sustained growth trend. When you find such keywords, use them in a way that it is easy for search engines to find, and at the same time give users a great page experience.