How to write for people and rank high with your keywords

Using the right keywords are important, but don’t let this drive your content.  It’s important to remember what your first goal should be and not your second.  Your first goal is write and provide useful content to people who do find your content.  Your second goal is for search engines to rank it well.

So, how can this be done?  Start by thinking about what your keywords are for your content.  Once you have your keywords decided, create a title for your content and integrate your keywords into them.  Make sure your title is intuitive, keyword rich, and catches people’s eye.  This can be done through good keywords, a secret, and/or a descriptive title describing exactly what the user wants.

Now that we have our title, we need to write our content.  My normal process is usually just like my goals: write the content for your intended audience first.  This is much easier than trying to properly integrate your SEO keywords right away.  Once you’ve finished your full article, give it a once over.  During this stage you want to focus on spelling and grammar mistakes or even filling in areas that need more descriptive information.

At this point your content should be completed and ready to go.  But before we rush into things, let’s review again to ensure we are going to maximize our potential.  Start by reviewing what your keywords are.  Re-read your content again and check to see if you are using your keywords actively and efficiently.

What is my definition of actively using your keywords?  It’s quite simple, when you are describing or explaining something, are you using your highest potential SEO keywords or are you using a different term because it flowed better when you were writing.  If it’s the former, excellent work; if it’s the latter, in those spots you should re-write the sentence slightly to incorporate your keywords.

It’s important to not strictly focus on just one or two keywords.  Ideally you should be focusing on around ten (10) keywords.  Interchanging between them to ensure you will rank well with all of the different keyword variations.

Next up is how do you efficiently use your keywords?  The easiest way to describe this is to get the dictionary definition of the word efficiently:

“Acting or producing effectively with a minimum of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort.”

What does this description tell us?  It tells me that I should use my keywords with minimal effort and to not overuse my keywords.  Overusing keywords can be just as bad, if not worse then under using your keywords.  Overuse of keywords by some search engines can be considered spam.

How do you not overuse?  There are no strict guidelines to this.  My general rule of thumb is don’t repeat your keywords more than 20% of the amount of words in your content.  Also, this is why we should try to focus on a variety of keywords, it makes it much easier to incorporate our keywords into our content with minimal effort and it won’t make it look like we are spamming.