Introduction to SEO: What is a Keyword?

 
Keywords are ideas and topics that help to define what your website’s content is about. In terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), keywords are the words and phrases that users enter into search engines to find the content they need. A keyword can consist of a single word, or it can be a keyword phrase of multiple words. In addition, it also helps search engines understand what content to show in the search engine results pages (SERPs). For your website’s content, you want the keywords that are included in your content to be accurate to your content itself, as well as related to what people are searching for, so people have a higher chance of finding your content among SERPs, and that content being relevant to their needs.

For example, if your page’s content was a famous apple pie recipe, you would likely want keywords related to apple pies and recipes within your content. Including non-related keywords, such as “cherry pie” would cause confusion with search engines and with consumers, and would like lead to the page performing poorly with both users and search engines.

How to Use Keywords in Your Content

An important first step when starting to choose keywords to include within your content is keyword research. This research helps you understand what keywords are going to fit your content the best as well as the keywords that people are searching for the most. There are numerous keyword research tools that can assist you in this process.

Once you have selected the keywords you’re going to use, it’s time to include them in your content. Typically, it’s best to have a primary keyword or keyword phrase in mind before you begin writing the content; however, keywords can be added to existing content as well. Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to have each page focus on a single keyword or keyword phrase.

Try to include your keywords within your content in a natural way, without artificially stuffing them into sentences. Doing so creates a poor user experience. After all, no one wants to read sentences like “Apple pie recipe for apple pies to make apples pies with baked apple pies”. While this sentence does include the keyword “apple pie” many times, it creates a poor reading experience. Moreover, Google and other search engines have learned to watch for sentences and content like these, calling it “keyword stuffing”. Websites who use keyword stuffing are actually penalized for this tactic, which harms your site’s ranking.

In order to help your content rank better for your target keyword, include them in areas outside of your page’s content. Having target keywords and phrases in your title tag, meta description, and header tags are invaluable for helping your page rank for those terms.

Optimizing Your Content Keywords

The BoldGrid Easy SEO Plugin for WordPress makes optimizing your content with your target keywords fast, simple, and easy. The plugin will automatically scan your page’s content for the most commonly used keyword or phrase. Based on this data, it will then tell you what keyword search engines will likely associate with the page.

This is a powerful feature for both existing content and new content. You are able to quickly and easily check to see if the page’s content is targeting the correct keyword. This allows you to perform quick checks on your website and ensures that each page is being found for the keyword that you are targeting. In addition, because the tool works instantly, you can test your content against multiple keywords by entering a new phrase. If the page needs improvement with targeting a keyword in a specific area (or multiple areas), the tool with automatically tell you which areas need attention and how to proceed.