Keyword Use and Search Engine Optimization

Blogging and article writing for the web have two things in common:

• Must be keyword rich comment without appearing to be “stuffed”
• Content must be compelling enough that readers come back again and again

How do you know when you have the right amount of keywords embedded in your work to keep the SEO spiders hungry for more and not overstuffed? First, if the writing is natural and flows normally, the spiders will be happy and will return again and again.  Keyword stuffing is a naughty practice of unethical bloggers who are trying to drive adsense dollars to their site. Fortunately, this ends up backfiring for many of these smarty pants bloggers and they get their blogs banned if they continue to misbehave.

Keyword stuffing is when you use words over and over in a way that the work is impossibly silly to read. For example, if you were to encounter the following sentence what would be your gut reaction:

John went to John’s uncle’s store to buy John’s mother a can of beans and John’s sister a bag of chips and John a pack of gum.

What keyword do you think the author was trying to embed? No one speaks or writes this way naturally. The spider’s know this and really resent landing on these types of sites.

Keywords should appear in your title, headings, and scattered naturally as they occur in your writing. Writing well is important. Engage your audience by offering value through your words. This will keep the audience returning to your work again and again and the spiders will still get fed.

What Not to Do With Keywords

Keyword rich articles, web pages, and blogs are critical if you want to keep SEO spiders fed. Keywords are what anchor searches to your entries on the web. They are also want vendors who are looking for ad space want to hook their ads to as well.

There are people who try to beat the system and who only manage to kill their own writing efforts. There is an old saying, “Winners never cheat and Cheaters never win.” This adage holds true in the use of keywords and their misuse by some nefarious bloggers and website owners.  But the people who own those SEO spiders are pretty smart and they know what is really happening. Pretty soon the cheaters’ plans back fire on them and they either get shut down or get nasty threats from the legal department of someone’s business.

So what are they doing that is raunchy and ill mannered abuse of key words?

• Irrelevant Key words - Using words irrelevant to page content to generate traffic.  For example, let’s say my blog site is all about dog food and dog food brand comparisons. But I know that the most popular blog topic of the week is “how to blog”. How to blog and dog food have NOTHING to do with each other. If I have loose blogging morals I might try and stuff “how to blog” in my dog food conversation to drive more traffic to my site.
• Key Word Stuffing- Repeating the same word over and over and over in a web page or blog entry. Some even go so far as to repeat the same keyword rich paragraph verbatim on the page. There is actually a tool called the “key word density cloud” to test if your page has keyword density overkill.
• Splogging- Prolific plagiarists who steal your blog content or your article content and post it as their own are dirty rotten sploggers. While mimicry is often called the highest form of flattery…stealing is stealing! All they want is your article and the web traffic that goes with it.

Finding the right amount of keywords for your site is similar to dieting, you have to find the right balance that works for you.  To keep you spiders happy and healthy, use keywords in moderation and drive your site responsibly!

7 Blogging Rules to Live By

1. Subject – Determine your primary theme for each entry and stay on it! Never stray or your readers will jump ship like rats leaping off the Titanic. If you are not clear on the topic discussed in a particular entry for your blog, how do you expect your readers to follow along? A simple thesis statement will help you stay focused on the theme.  
2. Informs the Reader – Chatty news that wastes a reader’s time is annoying and serves no purpose. Have something of merit to say.  It does not have to be earth shattering but it should make them think.
3. Originality - If the reader does not feel that they walk away with a new piece of information or a new perspective they probably won’t come back to visit your blog again. Offer an innovative or creative view that provides the reader with that “aha” moment.
4. Content – Clarity and simplicity make your content readable and “sticky”. Stickiness is important if you want to hook a reader and keep them engaged with your material. Too much information, too much detail, and too many meaningless adjectives make the content difficult to follow. Avoid jargon, techie terms, and extra adverbs (“ly” words) that add nothing to your content. Create compact segments of content that have sub-headings that act like directions to the key parts of your blog. Spell check and proof read all entries before and after they are ‘live’. You can and should go back in to edit if there are errors.
5. Headlines and Keywords – Be bold and daring and keyword rich in constructing headlines. Remove articles (a, an, the) and prepositions from your title. This makes it easy for search engines to pick up your latest entry and blast it out on the web. Readers search Google, Lycos, and Mozilla by keywords, not sentences. Keep your headlines short. If you have ten words or more in your headline, you have probably said too much.
6. Disciplined Blogging – Create a publishing schedule and stick to it. Perhaps you write a week or a month’s worth of blog entries in one sitting, you still have to faithfully log in and publish each entry. Put it on your day calendar right. If you schedule it in writing you are more likely to stick to your plan.
7. Blogging Rate – frequency and regularity of blogging submissions does count. Search engine spiders will visit and notice you and your site if there is change in your site. Blog regularly, blog often, and blog well.

 Shannon Evans, senior editor of www.mywritingmentor.com lives with her best friend Rick on Bainbridge Island in the Puget Sound just a “ferry ride from Seattle.” She works at her desk with her two Labrador virtual assistants, Mocha and Luke, and her feline copywriting assistants, Caesar and Yoda. She is widely recognized as one of the top writing coaches to authors of non-fiction. Shannon has over 17 years in the academic world teaching English composition to native and non-native speaking students.