It may be very well and good to have plenty of informative content on your website but if your website pages do not include the correct keywords, that which potential visitors are typing into search engines, then what are the chances that search engines will rank you highly for keyword phrases that generate a load of traffic? The answer is zilch, zero, nichts. Visit our article “What are Keywords All About” to learn more about keyword selection.

To target the correct keyword phrases we need to collect an extensive amount of data to find out several things.

The most important is keywords or keyword phrases which generate a high amount of traffic. For these are the most valuable keywords to your website that will bring in the most traffic.

As well as this however, we need to be sure that of those keywords and keyword phrases with high traffic, that we select keywords which are more likely to convert into customers. It may be well and good to have thousands of visitors flowing through your site, but if they are not converting into paying customers, then there is little point.

The third step is to filter these keywords to select those which can be inserted into your website best in order to keep the content flowing and natural to read. The last thing we want is to create content that does not make sense to your visitors due to over-optimization of website content.

Since there are thousands (and sometimes tens of thousands) of keywords and keyword phrases that visitors are typing into search engines, this can often be a very tedious process which demands much concentration and effort.

After we have found the best keywords and keyword phrases for your site we need to look at keyword insertion and keyword density. Keyword density is an extremely important step, as the incorrect keyword density may result in a spam filter being flagged on your site from search engines, meaning that you may actually decrease your website ranking rather than increase it. Find out more about keyword density in our previous article “Is Keyword Density Important?“.

Another important step is to analyze your competitors. We will look at whether or not they have employed content optimization (or search engine optimization) and analyze which keywords they are targeting. We will compare their content amount to yours and see where you can improve over their shortcomings. After all they may be ranked above you in search engines – we want it the other way around.

Hopefully, from this article, you have learned the importance of content optimization and some of the steps which take place to get the best results. There is a great amount of work that needs to go into content optimization if you aim to do it correctly and find those keywords to target that less of your competitors are targeting and which result in just as much or higher visitor numbers and a higher conversion rate to give you a higher Return On Investment.

1. What For?
   What do you plan to use your blog for? A blog is best used to add additional information to support the content that already exists on your website. This may consist of special offers, product reviews, special occasions, informational articles, news releases etc. Do not copy the exact content that exists on your website or you will trigger a duplicate content penalty in search engines and your website rankings will decrease rather than increase.
2. How Often?
   How often do you plan on updating your blog? How often will you add new posts? In order for your blog to be successful, and by successful I mean in order for people to come back and visit it often and more importantly for search engines to rank it highly, you need to add new posts a minimum of three times per week. Ideally you should post at least five times a week. If you cannot update your blog as often as this, then it may not be worth the effort to include a blog on your website.
3. Blog Location:
   Where you put your blog is very important. Many people will setup a new account with Blogger or the like and use their space. This results in a domain such as “yourblog.blogger.com” and they will usually like to their website and vice versa. Although this is a start, it is not the best start. Instead your new blog should be hosted on your own space and should be located as either a subdomain of your own website or as a subfolder. So ideally what you want is something like “www.your-web-address.com/blog/” or “blog.your-web-address.com”.
4. Blog Name:
   If your blog is hosted on your own space then “blog” is the most common term used for ease of use. If it is hosted on the blog systems URL, then it is best to use descriptive keywords seperated by hyphens and limit it to about three words maximum. So if you sell HP printers for example you could use the domain “hp-printers.blogger.com”, otherwise, your own URL should have your most important keywords in it and therefore “blog” should be sufficient.
5. Blog Plan:
   To keep your blog up to date it is best to have a plan in place of when you will update the blog as well as what topics you will update it with. Plan what topic you will post on each day of the week to ensure that you have enough content to write about. With a plan in place you can also schedule blog posts, writing them in advance.