In a previous post, How to Improve Your SEO Ranking, we discussed several ways to improve your search engine optimization.

Content is still king and it is important you have unique content on your website, landing pages, etc.   As you are writing you need to balance four different aspects that SEO takes into consideration.

4 Things to Keep in Mind

Here are the four pillars of quality SEO content:

1. Keywords

How to use in the content.

2. Length

How long your post should be for SEO purposes.

3. Unique

What makes your post different than all the others about a similar topic.

4. Valuable

Is the content valuable to your readers?

Often, one or two of these things are ignored.  It is important to remember that search engines are looking to serve up the top content for the particular query. Think of the search results as the “product” of the search engine company. They are striving to make their “product” the best.  So they are always on the hunt for the top of the line of content available.

The better the content they serve up to a searcher, the happier their “search customer” will be and the more likely they will return. This is the basic business model of search engines. So you see,  quality content is not an option. You must find a way to incorporate quality content.

Today we will focus more on keywords in your content.

Keywords in Content

So what tactics should you use to actually incorporate keywords into the content on your website?

In the early days of SEO, when search engines were easy to “trick,” keyword-stuffing was a common practice that actually worked! If you wanted your website to be found for “light blue zippered sweatshirt” your page would read like this…

“We have all of your light blue zippered sweatshirt at our light blue zippered sweatshirt store. Our light blue zippered sweat-shirts come in 3 sizes. Large light blue zippered sweatshirt, medium light blue zippered sweatshirt…”

I’m sure you get the picture.   Search engines have cracked down on this manipulative practice. In fact, now if you overuse a keyword, you can actually get penalized! You need to be savvy in implementing keywords into your content.

Search engines use keywords to help them build a picture of what the whole piece of content is about. In other words, they are smart enough to decipher your content without the overt use of keywords.

You can still gently guide the search engines toward the keyword or keyword groups that you would like a particular piece of content to rank for. Just don’t overdo it.

The primary keyword primary should be a natural fit in the flow of the sentence.  It should only be mentioned once or twice.

There you have it, the importance of keywords in your content.  In our next post, we will discuss the use of “long tail keywords.”