Keywords Should Align With Audience
When putting together a digital marketing plan, SEO is certainly going to be part of it. Keywords are always at the core of any good SEO plan, but the days of coming up with long lists of keywords are over. While this may have been commonplace ten or fifteen years ago, Google’s many algorithm changes over the years have made this thinking completely obsolete.
Instead, it helps to think about keywords in a different way. They need to align with the rest of your digital marketing, and they serve the purpose of attracting the right people to your website. Here’s more information about this:
Keywords Need to Align With Content
These days, keywords need to absolutely be in alignment with your website’s content. The search engines place priority on making sure that the content on the page is useful and best serves your audience. There are many tactics in order to make this happen, such as making sure that you have content on your website that services each phase of your buying cycle. When this happens, it is inevitable that you will include keywords in your copy that will help attract the right people to your website.
While you might be able to do some keyword research to find the best choices, chances are pretty good that the right keywords are already woven in. In fact, if you try too hard to find the right keywords, you might do your site more harm than good. Google labels this practice as including “irrelevant keywords” and it is worth noting that you service your audience much better by taking an extremely conservative approach when it comes to your keywords.
Make Sure You Stay Aligned With Google
When it comes to handling keywords, it is better to stay aligned with Google’s best practices. According to their “Webmaster Guidelines“, you want to avoid practices like Keyword Stuffing. Here is what they have to say:
“Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, or out of context (not as natural prose). Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
Take a Conservative Approach With Keywords
These days, this may seem like common sense, especially if you’ve been working with digital content for a while. However, you might be surprised to learn that there are those who still feel as if keywords need to be present on a page in order to really boost the website’s place in the search engines. The truth is, it is so much better to take a conservative approach.
Write your content, and then trust that the keywords will work themselves in. You can do some research if you want to help yourself stay focused on the flow of the content, but truthfully, this could do more harm than good. You are much better to ignore the idea of keywords entirely and just focus on creating useful content for your audience.
Categorized in: SEO
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