How to Use keywords smartly in blog posts?

Have you ever struggled to put keywords in your blog posts?

When you write quality content and still you are not getting the expected ranking in Google then there is something wrong with the post.

Why is this happening? Is there any specific reason?

We can not blame Google for it, but its algorithm changes periodically. We don’t know when our blog get impacted. There are more than 200+ ranking factors for Google search engine ranking.

Proper keyword research and placement in the blog post is one of the most important ranking factors for Google.

In this article, I will tell you how exactly you put your keywords in a blog post to improve page ranking. The smart use of keywords in your post will help you to improve your ranking.

Below are the ideal locations for keyword placement.

• Post titles
• Meta Description
• Images alt tags
• The first and the last paragraph
• Permalink
• Comments
• Yoast SEO plugin

Post Titles

Attractive, eye-catching post titles always attract more readers to click on the post. The post title is the right place for adding your target keyword. You can not directly add the keyword but you have to make a title meaningful without knowing that you have added a keyword. You have to add the targeted keyword in the first half of the post title.

Below is the example, here I am targetting ‘Hostgator affiliate’ as the main keyword. You can see that I have used this keyword at the start of the post title.

The title of the post helps the readers to know more about what the content is all about. I would recommend you add long-tail keywords because long-tail keywords are easy to rank.

Permalink

Permalink is the blog post URL. It is the second important place where you should consider adding your keyword.

Let me tell you one thing if you search for a query on Google. It will highlight the query in bold and gives you results. Google highlights the keywords in the post title, permalink, and meta description.

In the above screenshot, I am targetting ‘Grammarly Affiliate’ and this keyword was used in the post title and URL as well.

Meta Description

The meta description is a short description displayed below the title and URL of a post by the search engine. It is the third place where you have to add keywords.

You should write a short, meaningful description of what the post is all about, and also include your main target keyword smartly.

first and Last paragraph

If you are writing a blog article you should consider adding your main keyword to the first and last paragraph.

Also, consider adding more LSI keywords. LSI is the Latent Semantic Indexing keyword. LSI keywords are related keywords to our main target keywords.

You can use the LSI graph to find out the LSI keywords. Also, you can use Google related searches to get the LSI keywords.

Your post length plays a crucial role in adding LSI keywords because the longer the post you would add more keywords. So, try to keep the post length longer. Also, use long-tail keywords in your post.

Images alt tag

If you want to write a more engaging article then you have to use images, charts, graphs, etc. Let me tell you that you can use your blog images to optimize your blog posts for SEO. There are two places where you can add keywords in images titles and alt tags.

When you insert images to a blog post, you will get the option to insert the alt tag and title of that images. It will also be helpful to improve your search engine ranking for images and post as well.

Comments

The comment section is used to interact with our readers. If you are replying to any comments then you can add keywords smartly in the comments. You can try to solve the problems of as many as possible readers. This will help to grow your community if they like your content; they will come back to another topic.

SEO Yoast WordPress plugin

SEO by Yoast is a complete package of SEO. This plugin is useful for managing keywords and their density in blog posts. Also, it will remind you when you miss any place for keywords. You will get the SEO score for each post, so if you miss anything for optimizing your post then this plugin will help you to find out.

I have written a very good article on the configuration of this plugin, do consider reading it.

• How to configure the Yoast SEO plugin?

Things to be remembered while adding keywords in a blog post

1. Adding more keywords will not improve your ranking, maintain the density of keywords below 2%, which is considered as best.
2. Try to include keywords in all places which I have mentioned above.
3. Use Long-tail keywords.
4. Try to include as many LSI keywords.
5. You can use any keyword research tool to get the right keywords for your blog. I have written one article to find keywords freely.

Recommended SEO Tools

1. SEMrush
2. Ahref
3. Ubersuggest
4. Moz

You’ll love to read

• How to find out all the organic keywords on the indexed post with SEMRUSH?
• How to write SEO-friendly blog posts to get more organic traffic?
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• You are not getting enough organic traffic here is why