Why Online Work Needs Keywords
How Strategic Word Choice Brings in Readers
Online publishing pros use the best keywords for their work in order to bring in more readers. How do they know what keywords to use, and why do they need them?
People get online information through bookmarks, links on other sites, emailed links and search engines. But, search engines are overwhelmingly the way for finding online information. That traffic is mainly driven by the use of keywords. The words that are typed into the search box are ones that are highly sought after by webmasters and advertisers.
Why Keywords are Needed
To get the attention of the people who are searching for your item, you have to use the same words they're searching for. That can be done by looking for the keywords that are most often used to look for your subject matter. Those keywords are then used in the title of the piece as well as several times in the text.
Keyword Density
The percentage of your text that's made up of keywords is called its keyword density. The keyword density that will best get the item ranked in the search engines is hotly debated by those who publish online. Search engines don't reveal the exact density that's best, nor do they give away the best places in the text to have the keywords. The keyword density and placement information that's been gathered has been done by experimenting with keywords.
Even with experiments and anecdotal evidence going back for years, no one is really sure what the density should be. Some experts suggest having a keyword density of no more than one to two percent. Other people suggest having a density as high as 15 percent. Most of the advice from pros, however, suggests that a density of two to five percent is ideal for search engine indexing.
Where to Get Keywords
Those words are compiled by search engines into ranked words that command the most attention from people doing the searching. Those rankings are then shared with the keyword tools that exist online. Keyword tools let users type in their subject or keyword and get back a list of the similar words and phrases that are being searched for. Searching for a specific phrase can bring back no keyword data, or it may bring back hundreds of results. Those results are then ranked by how many searches are being conducted for each word or phrase.
Use the keyword data to substitute some words of your text with the best keywords to bring in readers. The density can be checked online with a keyword density tool or by counting the keyword in the text and dividing that number by the total number of words.
Keywords don't have to detract from the meaning or style of the text- find a way to add them in so that they sound natural. Avoiding too high a density will make it easy to find natural ways to add in the best keywords.
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