The importance of keywords in making your website search engine friendly

Why are keywords essential for your website?

Because search engine optimization can be a complex subject, I thought I'd dive specifically into keywords. After reading this article, you will be well-informed about the importance of keywords for your website and how to find and use highly effective keywords in order to make your website search engine friendly.

The importance of keywords in your website content

How often do you update the content on your website? What about your blog? Has it been abandoned or ignored all together? Maybe you're just falling prey to the busy world of entrepreneurship. The thing is, search engines love new, current and unique content. They pull the freshest and most relevant content each time a search is performed. So if your site hasn’t been updated regularly, you can bet your competitor’s content will rank higher than yours in the search results.

To avoid being ignored by Google and lose out on important organic traffic to your website, it’s important to update it often. A great way to do this is by consistently adding a new blog article at minimum once a month but more often will get you better results. You don't have to be a profound writer, but you will get valuable new words on your website and open many more doors for your visitors to access your whole website!

Be careful with keyword density

Adding keywords to your website is vitally important for SEO but some people can get a little too overzealous and incorporate far too many. They write articles using a specific keyword a dozen or more times aiming for high “keyword density” to let the search engines know they’re targeting that word or phrase. Unfortunately, this strategy actually works against them due to search engines penalizing keyword stuffing. Instead, focus each piece of content around one or two keywords and let synonyms, variations and so on come up naturally. Again creating more avenues for your website to be discovered.

Short tail vs. long tail keywords

There are two types of keywords to be aware of when writing with SEO in mind: Short tail and long tail. Simply, short tail keywords are 3 words or less. Long tail keywords are a little different. They are more than 3 words, more targeted and not as broad as the short tail. An example of a short tail keyword would be: “Business ideas” where this would be a highly competitive phrase due to it being so general. A long tail keyword is more specific such as: “Small business ideas for women entrepreneurs”. Which then begs the question: Which is better: Short tail or long tail?

Short tail keywords have several things working for and against them. If you are trying to drive a lot of traffic to your site, you should use short tail keywords. But the challenge is if your site is new, you are starting at the back of a very long line while facing an up-hill battle. When the stats are analyzed, what we see is that long tail keywords are(in general) the far better choice for focus and more importantly, getting the highly coveted conversions.

Why you should hire an SEO professional

Hiring an SEO professional saves time. Trying to do your own SEO will take up a lot of time, especially if you don’t know a lot about marketing or SEO. Running a full SEO campaign can be a daunting task to handle alone; fortunately, SEO experts have the knowledge and expertise to do this much faster and more proficiently than someone who is also focused on running their business in a different industry.

Hiring a professional will avoid you from making costly mistakes. A little mistake that you make now could cause large problems for you in the eyes of the major search engines later. Some examples include using your primary keyword too often or giving the images in your blog posts the wrong name. SEO mistakes like these can get your website penalized or maybe even blacklisted by Google.