Why Should You Optimize the Keywords and How?

Optimizing keywords might seem the same as exploring the best ones for any newbie. I also had walked through this confusion phase in the past. Later came to know the difference between them precisely.

Optimizing keywords includes choosing those that bring high traffic and the ones that bring less traffic as well. It is the process of making your website/blog more friendly to search engines.

Making website friendly to search engines? Is that allowed?

The answer is simply ‘Yes!’. Making website/blog friendly to search engines is allowed as far as it is friendly enough for your readers.

That means a blog that has no respect for readers and those which only worship search engines will never care at all. In fact, search engines will consider them as if they are trying to manipulate their search algorithms. So, they are also called with the name ‘black hats’. The search engines normally hate black hats(the manipulators) and so will ban them forever or de-ranks the website(s).

On the flip side, a website/blog that respects its readers by providing great content, navigation and other on-site sophistication that’ll make them feel good and happy for visiting your website will ever be honored by being picked up top in SERP(Search Engine Results Page).

What’s the need for keyword optimization? Is content not enough?

Yes of course! the content is the king, but it surely needs the army to make the kingdom stronger. The better & optimized keywords makes the army for your king.

Because I have seen many wonderful bloggers quitting blogging for no better reason than for just not getting traffic from search engines. Isn’t that disastrous? Can you imagine the blogosphere with only search engine disciples and not so great content everywhere? So need keyword optimization.

How to optimize keywords?

Here comes the interesting part of the article. Let’s learn the difference between exploring the best keywords and optimizing them.

Exploring best keywords is just finding out which terms are getting better traffic whereas optimizing them includes one or more best keywords as a combination.

Let us suppose that we are writing an article on ‘Xbox 360 red ring of death’. If we explore the keyword suggestions on it, we would be shown something like this,

The keyword ‘Xbox 360 red ring of death’ and its related terms nearly get 1million hits per month.

The ‘Xbox 360 red ring of death’ alone gets 2,400 average monthly searches and with ‘low’ search competition. If we could integrate it with the high competitive keywords, we could balance the equation in the competition.

If we explore the related terms, we could find the high competitive keywords like as shown below,

Though the monthly searches are a little low for the above 1st screenshot, the search competition for it is high. That means the keyword is ‘valuable’ and using it on your blog will increase the value of ad spaces, if you are using any contextual advertising programs like Google AdSense for monetizing.

Also, the chances of getting shown in the top of SERP will be high as the fellow webmasters and bloggers who are after traffic would not focus on it well.

Then our optimized title would be like “Repair Xbox 360 red ring of death”. But if we look at the monthly average stats, it shows a bit low stats than the previous one i.e., 1 million.

You may not get the best average monthly searches for the exact combination of the keywords but will surely get for the inner keywords. We have to make sure of it by exploring more deeply into it.

Inner keywords?

Inner keywords are the terms that lie within a keyword. These inner keywords would bring the traffic that you are not actually expecting.

Let’s check out the inner keywords that we have got for our optimized title.

“Repair Xbox 360” with 8 million searches

and “Repair red ring of death” with nearly 4 million searches

Totally making it to 13 million(1M+8M+4M=13M) searches per month.

Over to you

Such a way, an optimized keyword(s) will show the impact on all sides. The art of choosing one will come by the experience of using keyword planner tool and by blogging. Wish you all the best and hope it helped you understand how to optimize the keywords that you use on the blog.

Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts about it in comments below!