Basic SEO Tips for Bloggers: Importance of Using a Keyword

When it comes to finding blogging tips, you can look left and right and be smacked in the face with about a million different sites providing you with all sorts of tips. Naturally, this can become overwhelming. Some tips are easy to understand and seem so basic that once you read them you feel silly for never even thinking of them. Then, there are those dreaded topics that bloggers, especially newbies, don't even want to look up because it all seems so foreign. Is that what you think when people mention SEO? Because that's certainly how I felt when I first started blogging.

Now that I'm more than a year into blogging and have had time to learn the basics, and so much more, I'm starting to become a bit more comfortable with a lot of those "foreign topics." One of them happens to be SEO. For those who don't know, SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization' (and yes, I was one of those people who at first had no idea what SEO even stood for...) As a newbie blogger (or even a more experienced one!) sometimes trying to figure out SEO basics and tips for improving your blog can be really intimidating. That's why I wanted to try and break it down into basic, easy to follow steps and advice.

For this post, I want to focus on the importance of using a keyword in each of your blog posts and the steps you can take to really take your blog to the next level!

1. You will need to choose a keyword for your post. Make sure it's something that is relevant to what your post is about. Don't just throw in any keyword! It will make the rest of these steps that much harder. You have the option of using whatever "keyword" you feel fits best, but you can also search for keywords that happen to be trending at the time. A great tool to use is Google Adwords Keyword Planner.

2. Use your keyword in your blog post title. It doesn't have to be just the keyword, but it should definitely be somewhere in the title. For example, if you choose the keyword "baby pajamas" don't just title your post "Cute Baby Pajamas." Make it a little more specific while incorporating that keyword, such as "Five of the Cutest Baby Pajamas for Winter." Boom!

3. If you're using images, save the image with the keyword in the name. Google picks up on this! When people go to Google images to search using your keyword, the bigger the chance your picture (and blog post) will pop up there, too. Example: save your image as "babypajamas.jpg" rather than "image1.jpg"

4. Make sure you’re sprinkling in your keyword throughout your post. Don’t go overboard because people will notice and that will be a huge turn off! Just make sure you're using that keyword a few times throughout your post. It's also important that you try to input that keyword within the first 200 words of your post, because most search engines use that first block of text when analyzing. Wordpress has a widget by Yoast that will actually check your post for SEO and how you can improve it (and there are probably many more widgets out there to help you with this).

5. Use your keyword again in your search/post description. Haven't been using the description option? Start doing it! Your description only has to be a sentence or two, but including the keyword is another easy and simple way to help with your SEO. 

There you have it, folks! Simple steps to help your blog's SEO. Hopefully these were easy to follow and you now have a better understand of some basic SEO. If you have any other SEO tips to share with fellow bloggers, please do so in the comments below!

This post happily brought to you by Valerie, NJ State Rep, who blogs over at In-Between Life.

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