Daily Archives: December 29, 2020

How to Write Blog Content that Ranks on Search Engines

As a content creator, you want to balance what search engines like Google and your target audience want.

It’s possible to have a blog post ranking on Google that none of your readers find neither interesting nor useful. At the same time, you can provide as much value to your audience with your content, but nobody will be able to find it because it’s not ranking on Google for its search queries.

Therefore, by walking the fine line between search engines and your audience, you can attract more website visitors and compel them enough to perform your desired action.

In this post, you will learn how to write a great blog post that observes the best search engine optimization (SEO) practices and keeps your readers interested until the end.  

Conduct Keyword Research

The kind of keyword or search query you will optimize for your content separates a good blog post from a great one.

Keyword research is a critical part of your SEO content creation if you want your blog posts to appear on top of search engine results pages (SERPs). More importantly, you want to rank for search queries that many people search for in your niche.

For starters, type in your topic on Google Keyword Planner. It will suggest related keywords that could be used as blog post ideas. Here, you will see the search volume range or number of searches that the query receives in a month.

Google keyword planner

Ideally, you want to optimize for keywords with the most searches. But it’s not that simple —you also have to consider the difficulty of ranking on top of SERPs for your focus keyword.

In this case, you want to use premium keyword research tools like Ahrefs to find each search query’s keyword difficulty (KD). It collects data from search results and analyzes the ranking factors of each page.

Ahrefs keyword difficulty

The lower the KD score, the fewer the pages that are optimized for the keyword. As a result, it’s easier for your blog post to rank for this query.  

Brainstorm for a Click-Worthy Headline

Even if your page appears on top of SERPs, there is no guarantee people will click on your page to visit it. You have to give users a reason why they should click on your page instead of the others.

One thing that will help your blog post rise from the pack is by writing a great headline. What and how you will be writing headlines on your blog posts will decide whether users will click on your page or not.

For starters, use power words as much as possible.  These are persuasive and descriptive words that trigger a specific emotion in people. By using the correct power words in your blog post title, you appeal to their minds and hearts at the same time, compelling them to click on your page on Google search.

Another factor you must consider in your headline is the benefit.

Again, we go back to why users should click on your post—what will they learn after reading your whole post? By answering that question on your headline, you already have users eating by the palm of your hand!

At the same time, you don’t want to deliver on the promise of your headline. If your page title says “10 Effective Ways to Lose Weight Without Exercising,” your post should contain ten tips that are guaranteed to work. Anything less than that would disappoint the readers.

Finally, you want to include your keyword in your titles: the SEO title (the one that appears on SERPs) and the H1 title (which shows on the page).

These are critical on-page SEO factors that search engines look into when deciding which pages to rank for which keyword.

Write a Killer Introduction

Upon clicking on your page, you must sustain their interest in your page by crafting a compelling introduction.

You must inject personality and flavor in your intros instead of blandly presenting your post to readers to go straight to the article.

There are two frameworks you can use when brainstorming for blog post introductions. The first is the PAS framework, a copywriting technique that stands for:

  • Pain – Identify and define the problem of readers.
  • Agitation – Get specific regarding their problem. Cite or illustrate examples by putting yourself in their shoes to prove a point.
  • Solution – Mention that they can solve their problems after reading your post. 

Another blog introduction framework you can use is the APP method. Popularized by Brian Dean, it is another copywriting tactic that aims to prevent readers from bouncing away from your site. APP stands for:

  • Agree – State a fact about a problem that readers will agree with you about a topic.
  • Promise – Provide them with results on how you were able to overcome the same problem.
  • Preview – Give readers an idea of what will be discussed in the post regarding the solution to their problem.

Both frameworks allow you to empathize with readers regarding their problems and present your blog post as the solution. From here, you should have your readers’ attention hook, line, and sinker!

Insert Visuals

You don’t want to write a blog post that is just a block of text. This is the most effective way to bore your readers and force them out of your blog.

To allow your readers and blog posts to breathe, find visual content like images and videos that you can include in the content.  These could also help explain complex concepts and ideas much easier.

The easiest way to do this is by using relevant images from stock photo sites in the content or as a featured image.

However, the issue with stock photos is the lack of personality of most images. Also, there’s a good chance your competitors have used them in their blog posts as well. As a result, you lose some of the uniqueness and luster that would have helped your article stand out.

A way around this is by customizing these images using an image editing tool like Canva. Add different elements to the photo to make it your own using Canva’s easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor.

Aside from images, you can embed videos from YouTube, especially those that you created yourself. These can help increase retention rates on your blog if they watch the video on the post.

Include Links

Search spiders can crawl and index webpages thanks to links.

You should include two types of links in your blog post: internal (links pointing to pages in your blog) and external (links pointing to pages from other sites) links.

Ideally, you want to include as many relevant internal links as possible in your blog post. This helps facilitate the flow of link juice (formerly known as PageRank) or website authority equally across the different pages on your site.

Image source: Ahrefs

At the same time, after you hit publish on your article, link to other posts in your blog. The more posts you’ll link to it, the faster search spiders will be able to find and rank it on search results.

On the other hand, limit the number of external links you’ll include in your own blog content. Unlike internal links, external links allow link juice to escape your site, thus diluting some of your site’s authority.

Nonetheless, you shouldn’t avoid linking away from your blog. If there’s a good resource from a different site that you should share with your readers on your post, you should do it.

Finish off with a Compelling Call to Action

The key to writing the perfect post is mobilizing readers to take a particular action. And regardless of the type of blog posts you publish, you must ensure that they all have a call to action (CTA) that appears at the end of each. 

However, your CTA depends on the search intent of your post. There are two types of keyword intent for your blog posts: informational (keywords that answer a specific question) and commercial (keywords that help users make a purchasing decision).

In this case, if your keyword has an informational intent, your CTA should be to link to a similar page on your site and provide more info to readers. This helps keep readers engaged with your content and visit as many pages as possible.

For commercial keyword intent, link to landing pages on your to convert them into leads or customers. 

Conclusion

A successful blog starts and ends with writing blog posts. Having a solid writing process that considers what your audience and search engines want helps you reach success faster.

Hopefully, the tips in this post encourage and inspire you to build your system to start writing.

How to Do Link Building for a Website: 5 Proven Tactics

Link building remains arguably the most vital ranking signal in search engine optimization (SEO). The more high-quality links you build to your website, the higher your site rankings on search engines will be.

However, the challenge now is getting these sites to link back to you, which is easier said than done. Unlike on-page SEO, you have little to no control over how your link building campaign goes. In fact, the risk of not getting a link from valuable sites despite all your efforts. 

Therefore, you need to approach your link building efforts carefully. Getting any type of backlink you can get online hoping that they’ll help improve your search engine rankings simply won’t work. Nowadays,  you must develop well-coordinated link building strategies to get the best backlinks possible.

This post shares with you some of the trusted and time-tested tactics you can implement to build links pointing to your site. 

Create Linkbait Content

The best link-building strategies naturally attract links, and linkbait content is one of them.

Explaining link-worthy content is difficult because the factors change depending on your niche. However, below are the qualities that most linkbait content share:

  • It offers actual value and utility to its intended audience.
  • Readers feel your desired emotion from your piece.
  • It is visual and easy to understand.
  • It is topical, newsworthy, and relevant.

A perfect example of classic linkbait content is Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO. It is one of the first resource guides in the early 2010s that comprehensively explained SEO to the public. And during a time where valuable information about this practice was not available, this guide garnered lots of attention and backlinks in the process.

 

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As mentioned, creating valuable content that the market desperately needs won’t necessarily generate tons of backlinks. There sadly isn’t an exact science behind linkbait content. But at the very least, you should strive to create content by following the qualities above shared by this type of content.

HARO Link Building

Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is an online platform that connects journalists to subject matter experts (SMEs) for quotes and soundbites to include in the pieces they’re currently writing. 

Upon signing up as an SME, you will receive regular emails containing queries from writers for popular media outlets such as Reuters, Mashable, The New York Times, and others. If you answer questions and choose to be published on the articles, you can get editorial links from these sites.

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HARO’s straightforward process has made it one of the best sources for building links to your site. 

However, getting chosen to be published on these sites is a different story. Since journalists are getting many answers to their questions, you’ll have to compete with other SMEs to provide them with the best answer.

The best thing you can do is position your answer to be the best of the bunch. A way to do this is by sending over your answer minutes after you receive their request from the email. Providing a sufficient answer faster than anyone else allows you to make a lasting impression on journalists.

Also, make sure your answers are not more than 200 words. You want to make sure that journalists can quote and include them in their pieces without issues.

Blogger Outreach

Blogger outreach refers to the process of emailing bloggers and asking them to link to your site. The goal here is to get bloggers to link to your site without buying links or exchanging links with your goods and services. These link schemes violate Google Webmaster Guidelines.

In this case, the best way to approach this method is by taking a page from the Skyscraper Technique by Brian Dean.

First, find content by other websites in your niche with the most sites linking to it. Ahrefs has a feature that lets you see what these web pages are at a click of a button.

Next, replicate the same content on your site but create a much better version of it. Update the information and develop more visuals.

Then reach out to the sites linked to your competitor’s content and send them your newly minted content. When finding emails, Hunter is one of the more accurate email finder and verifier tools out there. It will extract different emails from the domain of people you can reach out to regarding the backlink.

Keep in mind that these are just intelligent guesses, as there’s still a chance that the emails provided here are incorrect.

Finally, you need to craft an email asking them to link to your page, which is better in every sense of the word, instead of your competitor.

Make sure to send follow-ups days or weeks after your initial emails, as there’s a good chance they missed out on the first one. At the same time, you don’t want to keep sending them follow-ups; if they didn’t respond to your first few emails, they’re probably not interested in linking to it.

Because this link building tactic uses cold emailing, there is a low probability that bloggers and site owners will link to your page. Therefore, make sure to send to as many prospects as you can. The more site owners you send your drip campaign to, the more likely at least a few of them will link to your site.

Guest Posting

In this part, we’re not referring to sites that have a page accepting guest posts. You don’t want to write for these sites because Google may manually penalize them due to having buzzwords like “guest post,” “write for us,” and “advertise.”

Instead, you want to reach out to sites that accept guest posts but don’t have a page accepting them. And the only way for you to know is to send them an email about it. Ask them if they’re taking guest posts and prepare a list of topics that you can write for the website.

When coming up with topics, conduct keyword research first by finding relevant terms that the site isn’t ranking for. Using Ahrefs, you can see this by going to Organic search > Competing domains and clicking on keywords unique to competitors.

From the article you’ll write, you can include a link to your site within the content on the author bio, depending on the site’s editorial guidelines. 

Unlike blogger outreach, guest posting outreach has a higher success rate because it offers something of value to site owners. Instead of just asking people to link to your site, you provide them with a well-written blog post for a keyword that they’re not ranking for yet. 

Broken Link Building

This link building strategy aims to find broken links of resource pages relevant to your niche and recreate the page of the broken link on your page.

The easiest way to do this is by searching for “[niche] intitle:resources”—replace [niche] with your own— on Google. The search results should show you pages that contain links to different pages related to your industry.

Next, find broken links using a Chrome extension like Broken Link Checker. After clicking on the icon, it will analyze the page for links that no longer work.

From here, identify these links and paste them into Wayback Machine. You should see different versions of the page when it was still up.

Take the latest cached version and recreate it on your site. Then, similar to the blogger outreach approach above, make it better by adding more information and visuals.

Using this newly published content on your site, you can dangle this to the site owner of the resource page since the original link no longer works. They won’t have any choice but to link to your page instead.

Conclusion

Link building for SEO purposes is arguably the most significant obstacle that websites must overcome to rank on top of search engine results. 

The main thing you need to keep in mind is that not all links will be equal. Some will help move your site up search rankings than others. This will depend on how many authority sites link to you, where the link is located, what anchor text you used, and others.

Hopefully, before you worry yourself about these factors, you need to lay the foundation of your website’s great link building strategy. The link building techniques explained above should help you get started on this.

How Long Does SEO Take? The Truth Revealed!

So, you’ve implemented and executed a well-thought-out search engine optimization (SEO) strategy on your website. The question now is, when will my site rank on Google search engine results pages (SERPs)? 

Assuming that you comb through your list of SEO tasks, you should expect your site to appear on search results soon, right?

Unfortunately, things aren’t as cut and dry as they seem. Just because you did everything by the book, it doesn’t mean you’ll rank within days or weeks. In most cases, it could even take months or years before your SEO takes full effect on SERPs.

The truth is that there are lots of factors that determine how long your SEO will take. This post will show you examples of sites and how long it took before Google indexed its pages for its SEO efforts. 

From here, we will look at the primary factors that determine how long you’ll have to wait before your SEO kicks in.

Examples of SEO Case Studies

As mentioned, the time it takes before SEO takes full effect varies. In this SEO case study conducted by Nick Eubanks, their agency FTF achieved SEO success for three sites in different industries.

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In the post, Nick discussed the different tactics he applied for the SEO strategies of each site. Since each site is unique aside from the various niches they’re in, they present unique problems and require SEO campaigns unique to each.

From the screenshot above, you can see that it took years before the sites eventually took off. However, if you look closely, you can see that the traffic has been trending upward through the years, so it’s not like it just gained organic traffic overnight. 

At the same time, this also means that the SEO campaign was implemented this entire time—it wasn’t a one-time campaign that was waited out until the site magically gained traction on search results.

Another case study shows you that it’s possible to get a site from zero traffic to 150,000 monthly unique visitors within eight months.

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Growth Machine launched a tea-focused blog from scratch and grew by piecing together different tactics and strategies to form a full-scale SEO campaign.

Our final SEO case study comes from Spencer Haws, owner of NichePursuits.com and the WordPress plugin Link Whisper. Using his plugin, he simply applied an internal linking strategy by linking related pages with each other and pointing to orphaned pages to help get them crawled and indexed.

After building 108 internal links, his niche grew its traffic from 1,200 views a day to 6,000 daily visitors within three months.

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Compared to the two above, the most interesting thing about this case study is that he simply added internal links to his existing pages. He didn’t build links or create newly published pages and yet managed to grow his site’s traffic in the shortest amount of time.

Factors that Affect How Long SEO Results Manifest Themselves

From the examples above, it should be clear that how fast or long SEO takes depends on multiple factors. 

And to help you make sense of them, below are variables that play a crucial role in determining when you can expect your site’s SEO to take shape. This way, you can do away with unrealistic expectations and not overreact if your site hasn’t made headway yet.

Authority

A site’s authority is built through the years of implementing SEO consistently. It can achieve authoritativeness by observing the best on- and off-page SEO tips and practices. 

You will find link building and creating content optimized for their target keywords and search intent at the very core of your SEO process. And both take a lot of time and effort to complete.

This is why authoritative websites with years under their belt have better search visibility than new sites. 

While domain age in and of itself is not a ranking factor, there’s a strong correlation between a website’s age and its SEO performance. The more optimized a site is, the more authoritative it is in the eyes of Google. As a result, the higher it ranks on search engines. 

In the case of Spencer’s website, it was already up years ago and has hundreds of quality content published about its topic. All it needed to do was to create internal links to relevant pages, and it was able to boost its traffic in a short period.

Niche

Your site’s success on search engines depends on how fast you can catch up with sites in your industry. 

Some niches are much easier to rank for in a short period, while others take much longer to appear on Google due to stiff competition.

To help you determine how competitive a niche is, you can run quick keyword research on Ahrefs. Enter your niche as the keyword and check the ideas the tool found for it.

Ahrefs keyword difficulty

From here, you’ll be able to see the keyword competition of the related terms. The more high competition keywords you’ll find, the harder it’ll be for your site to break into the top of the search rankings.

At the same time, each website requires different strategies and tactics since not all practices apply to each niche. In this case, you have to figure out which techniques will work best for a particular.

Nick Eubank’s case study should shed more light on this. His SEO agency conducted different approaches tailor-made to grow each site to where they are now. And while it took them years for the traffic to multiply, imagine if they rolled out a different campaign with tactics that don’t apply to the niche.

Technical SEO

Finally, you must tend to your site’s technical issues to ensure that search engines can crawl and index them in the first place.

If your site has failed to grow its organic traffic despite your best efforts, maybe Google can’t read and process your pages correctly. This may have something to do with how your website is set up.

For starters, you need to host your site on a reliable hosting provider. It helps increase the uptime of website pages and make them more available to your audience. More importantly, it improves site speed and creates the experience of visiting your site more pleasurable for people and search spiders.

Once you have your site up and running, you also need to conduct a full SEO audit of your site using tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

The results will show you issues and errors that you didn’t know existed, such as broken links, duplicate content, keyword cannibalization, and others. From here, you need to implement improvements based on the suggestions provided by your audit tool of choice.

Finally, you can check Google Search Console to see how Google views your site. On the dashboard, you will be able to see issues that need your utmost attention so you can fix them before something worse happens.

Conclusion

As part of your digital marketing strategy, SEO will be one of the best traffic sources for your site. However, you must temper your expectations when waiting for significant results to manifest on search engines.

Keep in mind that you are at the mercy of Google’s algorithm. It will rank your site eventually, but you have to make it as search-engine friendly as possible for that to happen. From here, only time will tell until your site is rewarded in its SEO journey.

How to Find Best Keywords for SEO the Right Way

At the heart of search engine optimization (SEO) is keyword research.

It sounds simple enough to do on paper—find phrases that people look for on search engines and optimize for them on your site. But you can’t just do that and expect your website to rank on top of Google search every single time.

There’s a lot more involved in the keyword research process, and the bulk of it has to do with knowing the exact factors you need to consider in your research. From here, you’d be able to discern whether or not you should try and rank for a particular keyword or not.

This post helps you choose the right keywords by identifying the most important factors and how you can extract them from your research. In the end, we will synthesize all the factors mentioned to help refine your method of SEO keyword research.

Relevant

This factor determines how closely related a keyword is to your topic. The closer it is, the more reason you should try and rank for it on your website.

When it comes to keyword research tools, Google search is arguably the best one out there. A simple query will show you data on search engine results pages (SERPs) that will help you refine your search immediately.

There are different sections on Google search when you can extract keyword ideas for your topic. The first one is its autocomplete feature. You can see this when you’re typing the topic or seed keyword on the search bar.

Google tries to predict queries you may be trying to search for. As a result, it shows you the most relevant search terms for the topic.

Once you’re on SERPs, you can find keyword ideas in the People Also Ask (PAA) section. Not all queries will have this section, but if it does, it will look like this:

If your keyword is too broad, you can create content that answers the specific questions found here.

Finally, the Related Searches found at the bottom could further expand your keyword research.

There are times that the Related Searches section will show you the same keywords found in the autocomplete section. But if not, you can click on any of these keywords to branch off and find more keyword ideas you can optimize for your site.

Appropriate Search Intent

When researching for keywords, you have to ask why users are looking for them on search engines. Just as important, you need to know what they want search engines to show them on SERPs. 

Search intent is an aspect of keyword research that is concerned with both questions. By answering these questions, you would be able to create content that satisfies user expectations. At the same time, search engines will reward your site by helping you rank higher on search results.

In your research, there are three types of search intent you need to be mindful of: navigational, informational, and transactional.

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At this point in your SEO, you should concern yourself with walking the tightrope between informational and transactional keywords. Ideally, you want to optimize for keywords with transactional intent because there’s a higher chance of converting visitors into customers and increasing your sales.

However, the latest link spam algorithm update discourages sites from creating review and affiliate sites geared towards sales. This is another way of Google saying that you need to create content optimized for keywords with informational intent. 

This way, you’re able to provide value to your target audience first and earn their trust first, which paves the way for higher conversions and revenue in the future.

To help you find informational keywords aside from the PAA section on SERPs, use the keyword research tool Answer the Public and type in your topic there.

You should then be able to see questions and long-tail keywords that you can use to create content for your website.

High Search Volume

As mentioned above, you need to find keywords that people search for online. Even if your site is ranking on top of SERPs, it won’t matter if nobody is searching for the keyword phrase your site is optimized for.

This is why you should highly consider finding high-volume keywords. You can find them using Google Keyword Planner for starters. It’s a free tool that shows you keyword suggestions and the monthly search volume of each.

google keyword planner

You can use this tool to find the search volume data of the keywords you already found from your initial research.

The only issue with Google Keyword Planner is that it only shows you the range of search volumes and not the approximate number of searches in a month. 

Low Keyword Difficulty

Keyword difficulty (KD) pertains to how easy or hard it is to rank for a keyword. Each keyword tool has this metric that calculates the SEO metrics of the top-ranking pages for a keyword. The higher the score, the more challenging it’ll be for you to rank for the term.

Premium keyword research tools like Ahrefs have a keyword difficulty score to help you filter out keywords you should optimize from the ones you shouldn’t.

Ahrefs keyword difficulty

As one of the best SEO tools out there, Ahrefs also lets you type in your seed keywords and find a comprehensive keyword list organized into types. This helps speed up your research process even more.

KD helps you expedite the keyword research process, so you don’t have to manually check if it’s worth the effort to rank for a term. However, keep in mind that keyword difficulty scores should never be the be-and-end-all when researching for keywords. Just because a keyword has a high KD doesn’t always mean you shouldn’t try and rank for it. 

Putting It All Together: SEO Avalanche Theory

Now that you know the factors that you should consider in your keyword research, it’s time to put them all together in a repeatable process. It should help you determine which exact target keywords to optimize for so you don’t feel lost and wonder why you’re not ranking for your keyword phrases.

A process you could replicate in your website is the SEO Avalanche Technique by Chris Carter over at Builder Society. In a nutshell, the theory states that you should optimize for search queries with search volumes in line with your site’s tier

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For example, if your site is in level 50, it means it’s attracting 50-100 organic visitors a month, which means you should search for keywords with a search volume between 50 to 100. From here, find all related keywords about your topic and optimize for each one. Don’t also forget to consider the KD score of each so you can rank faster for keywords with low difficulty.

You can scale up your ranking faster by targeting keywords within your tier level instead of optimizing for keywords beyond your level. And once you move up a tier, you can unlock more keywords to work on your site.

It’s a simple but sustainable process that will help you make sense of your keyword research workflow. Finding search terms using this framework and following the factors above, you should find the right keywords to boost your SEO rankings.

How to Use Keywords for SEO to Rank on Top of Google

You should already have done keyword research and compiled a list of keywords you’d want to optimize for your site. At this point, it’s just a matter of using them properly as part of your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign to help move up the search rankings and increase your visibility.

This post will show you the exact steps you must take to leverage keyword optimization and get the most out of your SEO efforts.

Create Topic Clusters

Topic clusters refer to groups of interlinked pages in your website, with each group discussing a particular subtopic in your niche. Here’s a visual representation of a topic cluster:

In the example above, pillar content is surrounded by cluster content pages that link back to it and vice versa.

Topic clusters can have different interlinking structures. For instance, some groups link cluster content pages with each other. The most important thing to remember is that you must isolate topic clusters from each other as much as possible.

The purpose of topic clusters is to increase your site’s topic relevance. Organizing your pages into different clusters, you help search spiders crawl and index your website more efficiently. And as they see that you grouped your pages semantically, spiders will start acknowledging your site as an authority in your niche.

From your list of SEO keywords, you need to identify which among them you should use for your pillar content and cluster content. 

Ideally, long-tail keywords make for perfect secondary keywords to be used for your cluster content. On the other hand, head keywords with a high search volume will serve your site’s primary keywords and are better optimized for pillar content. Here’s another example of how your cluster will look like:

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If you want to automate the process of grouping your keywords into their appropriate clusters, a keyword research tool like Keyword Cupid should help you get the job done. 

Simply feed the tool your keywords, and it will take care of clustering them together by reverse-engineering Google’s Knowledge Graph using actual data from search engine results pages (SERPs).

Mention Them in the Three Kings of SEO

After identifying which keywords you plan on optimizing for your website, you must observe the best on-page SEO practices on each page. And the best way to do this is by mentioning your keyword on the page’s content. 

This way, you inform search engines that your content is about a specific topic, and it should be indexed for that search term.

However, we’re not referring to keyword stuffing, a tactic where you must mention the keyword in the content as many times as possible. This worked years ago, but it’s no longer the case now that Google’s algorithm can detect these spammy tactics.

Instead, you need to mention the primary keyword of your page on the right parts of the content. In this case, you must include them in what I call the “three kings of on-page SEO.” They are the URL, SEO title tag, and page title. 

You can also consider including your keyword on the subheadings and content of the page, but their results won’t be as impactful compared to mentioning the keyword to the last three elements.

Editing the keywords into the three kings is performed when you log in to your site. For WordPress, you can change the URL and page title on the blog post or page editor.

For the SEO title tag, which is the one that appears on search results, you must use an SEO plugin like Rank Math.

It allows you to write a title containing your keyword that’s different from your page title. This is important because you want to make your SEO title more click-worthy to generate more organic traffic.

To help your cause, you can also edit the meta description so make your case as to why they should click on your page.

While Google sometimes edits the meta description depending on the search query that your page appears in, it’s good to have a default description that search engines in general, could easily pull once your content is indexed.

Optimize for Content

When writing content for the page, you want to cover as much ground about the topic as possible. That means mentioning words and phrases in your content that are relevant to your keyword. 

And we’re not just talking about related keywords that you will find from keyword research tools. We’re referring here to TF-IDF which stands for term frequency-inverse document frequency.

In layman’s terms, TF-IDF involves the process of finding words that are mentioned the most (term frequency) using data from the search engine rankings of a keyword. Then it eliminates the most common words like prepositions and conjunctions from the list (inverse document frequency) to filter out unique words that are common for that keyword phrase.

SEObility has an integrated TF-IDF feature that shows phrases related to your keyword to include in your content.

From here, consider which words you should mention in your content based on the number of times the top-ranking pages mentioned them in their content. The goal is to make your content similar to those ranking on the first page for your target keyword. This way, you can increase the correlation between the best-ranking pages and yours.

Use Keywords as Anchor Texts for Links

Finally, when you start building links to your site pages or implement a site-wide internal link strategy, you must use the keywords as anchor texts.

However, you don’t have to use the same keywords for internal and inbound links. 

The goal is to make your links look as natural as possible, and using the exact anchor text is a red flag that could lead Google to penalize your site.

Therefore, you must diversify your anchor text using partial matches as well. This anchor text type contains your keywords but has added words or a variation of your primary keyword.

To help you come up with variations you can use as anchor texts, Linkio has an Anchor Text Generator tool you can use. Just fill the short form to get keyword ideas as to which anchor texts to use.

Conclusion

Properly using keywords in your site pages in line with the best SEO tips and practices will help search engines crawl and index them appropriately. By creating topic clusters and optimizing your content creation and link building campaigns, you can get your site ranking for your target keywords in no time.