Last week, we started our series on keywords: the words people use to find your blog. We looked at a few ways of identifying those keywords—and this week we’ll look at how we can put those keywords to work.
On your site
Use the keywords you’re targeting on your site. If the keyword is really integral to the site, you might try to find a way to work it into your blog name or even URL. In the Quick Guide to Google Analytics for Blogs, I mentioned a few more places to use these keywords.
- Making it a label, tag or category on your blog
- Making it part of the navigation, like your About or Contact page
- Including it in the Title or Description of your blog
- Writing a post that sums up (and links to) all your tips (if you do this, be sure to go back through the old posts and link to the new one, as well).
And of course, use it in the text. However, write your posts with people in mind, not just search engines—write to your audience, using the words they’re using to find you.
Around the Internet
Pages on your site are a good way to start using the keywords you want to target. But to really target these keywords, you should look at ways to get links back to your site using those keywords as the text of the links (the “anchor text”).
There are a few easy ways to do this—your friends’ blogrolls, for example. Also, blog carnivals and other memes are a good way to get links where you can choose exactly what that anchor text is.
Finally, you can try to create “linkbait”—something everyone will want to link to, share, use on their sites (with links back to yours, of course). There are many forms of this—awesome articles, fun quizzes, cool widgets. If you’ve got the imagination, you can probably find someone with the skill to create it for you.
Using the keywords that search engine users enter to find sites like yours tells search engines your site is relevant for those terms—especially when that “vote” of relevance comes in the form of a link from another site. Using the keywords you’re targeting both on and off your site will help people who are looking for sites like yours, find you.
What do you think? What other ways do you get links? How else can you use your keywords on your site?
Keys by Kit