How to Use Keywords Correctly: 3 Main Criteria to this Subtle Art

One of the most important components of search engine optimization, or SEO, is knowing how to use keywords correctly for your website or blog. Using these words on your website works a bit like the light on the lighthouse. Without them, your SEO efforts are pretty much dead in the water, but with them, your website will stand out in the sea of websites in your niche on the Internet. Here’s what you need to do to find the right keywords for your site.

And if you don’t know what SEO is, check out my easy-peasy guide to the most common tech terms in blogging and SEO.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. This means that if you purchase any of my recommended products at the bottom of the post, I will earn a small commission at no extra charge to you. Keep in mind though, that I only post affiliate links to products and services I personally love and use myself! Purchasing through my page ensures that I am able to keep writing useful content for all of you.

Table of Contents

Finding the Right Words

When it comes to knowing how to use keywords correctly, it can sometimes be a little bit more of an art than a science. When people search the web, they usually use specific phrases. For example, if they’re looking for a home in your town, they may type the words “new houses near me” or “new houses in [my city].” If you’re a real estate agent trying to sell homes in your town, then your website should have words like these on it, embedded naturally within the content.

Those words are the right keywords to attract potential customers or clients to your website. According to Jeff Bullas, when you use the proper keywords, then you stand a better chance of getting the targeted traffic to your site that you want.

But how do you know if you’re choosing the right keyword?

You can find the right keywords for your blogs, meta descriptions, and website titles using tools like the Google Keyword Planner, Word Tracker, Pinterest, YouTube (because Pinterest and YouTube are search engines) or some other similar program. These programs will give you a list of keyword phrases that would fit in your niche.

Appropriate Frequency

Many novice digital marketers make the mistake of using their keyword phrases too often on their website, which means they are basically spamming the Internet with their content. This is a mistake. According to Dotcom Design, excessive usage of keywords is sometimes referred to as “keyword cannibalization” and tends to be indicative of lower-quality content—something that can damage your ranking.

A good rule of thumb for choosing the right keyword density is to try to use your primary keyword phrase once every 100 words. That doesn’t mean that you’ll always use your keyword phrase one time every 100 words exactly. Rather your keyword usage will be proportionate to the word count of the article or blog post. For example, if you’ve written a 500-word article, then your keyword phrase will appear throughout the content about five times.

Related Keywords

Using related keywords to your main keyword phrase will help the search engines better catalog your website. According to Crazyegg, these words are referred to as “latent semantic indexing.” It’s easiest to understand what these words are by way of example. Let’s say you have a cooking blog, and the keyword phrase you’re trying to rank for is “comfort food.” Related keywords to this could be keyword phrases like “easy macaroni and cheese recipes,” “homemade grilled cheese,” “cooking from scratch” or “cooking like grandma.”

TL;DR

Your website plays a key role in growing your business. Using the correct SEO techniques (including using keywords correctly and choosing the right keyword density) helps you reach this goal.

But if you struggle with how to use keywords, the techniques covered in this article combined with your consistent content-marketing efforts will help you to eventually corner the market in your niche over the course of time.