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I'm relatively new to blogging - only been doing it for a few months. The common advice is to make your posts keyword rich for high search engine ranking. But I don't normally worry too much about that. I do take it into consideration, and make an effort to include keywords if it makes sense, but I don't go crazy if I can't. My biggest concern is making my posts informative and easy to read.

Just curious as to what your thoughts are on this topic. How do you approach your writing? Do you try to make your posts as keyword rich as possible? Do you not worry about it at all? And how successful (i.e. increasing readership) have you been with your approach?

Also, do you have any recommendations on how to increase the use of keywords in blog posts?

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Thanks everyone for your answers. I'm happy to see that everyone agrees that keywords are really not that important. I selected Elie's answer because he suggested a technique that doesn't totally ignore keywords, but if I had the option to choose more than 1 answer I would have :-) – Zuly Gonzalez♦ Sep 9 '10 at 1:37

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I've been writing for a year and a half, about to hit 300 articles on my site. While I don't ignore keywords completely, I usually take them into account after the fact, or when writing titles. That is, I write what I want to write, but will then modify the title to be link bait, or toss in a keyword.

The end result, though, is that it doesn't seem to make much difference in most cases. I'm still being found by people asking the questions I answer on my site, regardless of whether or not I've optimized that article in particular. I'm not getting a lot of hits for random keywords, but more for the overall content.

In summary, I would suggest you basically ignore the issue of keywords, and focus on writing good copy in general, and writing about interesting topics to your target audience.

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Good advice Elie! I think I'll try your approach of taking keywords into account after the fact, but I won't make a big deal of it. If I can naturally replace a phrase with a keyword, I will, if not, no biggie. – Zuly Gonzalez♦ Aug 26 '10 at 17:24
up vote 7 down vote

None at all.

I know some people say it's the whole thing, but in the past three years of blogging I still get almost zero traffic from Google and tons from human beings sharing links (in every way: Twitter, FB, Reddit, blog posts, email, whatever).

You win when people like it and tell their friends.

It's too hard (IMHO) to compete on Google with everything else, especially when you're new to it.

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Thanks for the feedback Jason. Funny thing, your blog actually inspired this question. I was reading your blog yesterday when I realized that it seemed like you didn't worry about keywords at all. Your posts are very well written, enjoyable to read, and you don't get the feeling of forced keywords, like you do with other blogs. – Zuly Gonzalez♦ Aug 26 '10 at 16:22
Yup! :-) You probably saw this already, but here's my own theory of my blog's success (although now instead of 6,000 subscribers there are 16,000!): blog.asmartbear.com/… – Jason Aug 28 '10 at 23:05
up vote 5 down vote

Don't worry too much about the keywords in your posts. I agree with Jason that the best way to increase traffic to your blog is to write interesting content, good content will keep people coming back to your site. However, I believe it is also important to make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog, either by email, rss feed, etc... try to motivate people to comment by asking them to do it at the end of your posts, etc... and if you are interested in getting some traffic from search engines then you could use "good" keywords in the title of your posts, that should be sufficient.

I have a new blog, just started it a month ago and just like Jason mentioned above, most of the traffic comes from hacker news, twitter, StumbleUpon, etc... I don't worry about keywords, however, there have been a couple of posts where because of the title of the post, I rank 1 or 2 in Google from thousands of results... I just think that is interesting, since this is a new blog.

These are the some of the search where my blog ranks just below Google's own news site, I did nothing to accomplish this, just used descriptive blog post titles:

  • texas education channel on itunes u
  • 499.00 jet blue deals
  • profit earn by dell (my site ranks higher than businessweek for this one... :))
  • wpengine and secure ftp

Write good interesting content and you'll be fine, more importantly, be honest and do not try to make everyone happy.

Good luck!

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Thanks Ricardo! Sounds like you're doing well! Good point about keywords in the blog titles being more important. The search terms you rank high in Google are very specific, do you still rank high on more generic keywords? I do rank high for a few very specific keywords, but if I make the search terms just a little more generic, I'm nowhere to be found. For example, I'm highly ranked for "facebook fake user profiles", but not for "facebook fake profiles". – Zuly Gonzalez♦ Aug 26 '10 at 17:00
Also, just curious, have you had much success getting inbound links? I haven't had much success with this, although I must admit, I haven't tried too hard because our site still looks like crap. It's a little embarrassing right now :-) I've just been working on getting content on our blog...which I haven't been very consistent with either. – Zuly Gonzalez♦ Aug 26 '10 at 17:17
I get some traffic form inbound links, nothing big. I try to participate in many blogs related to topics such as startups and technology and this helps because many of these sites will include a link to your website when you leave a comment. It is all about consistency, just keep writing blog posts, write about web security, offer tips, examples, etc... Also, participating in sites like hackernews and Twitter has helped me a lot to bring traffic to my site. Ranking good for common keywords is hard, too many sites competing for those generic terms, ranking high for specific terms is not bad :) – Ricardo Aug 27 '10 at 0:14
Thanks for sharing your experience Ricardo! That was helpful. – Zuly Gonzalez♦ Sep 9 '10 at 1:04
up vote 1 down vote

Sometimes I look at my analytics for keywords that are bringing traffic to my site, and if its a phrase I haven't blogged on before, I'll write a blog about that phrase.

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Thanks for the suggestion. I've used analytics to see what keywords are working, and then try to write more posts on those subjects. But I haven't tried to write about new topics as you suggest. – Zuly Gonzalez♦ Sep 9 '10 at 1:18
up vote 0 down vote

We don't. Our blog is very topic specific and trying to game Google would just alienate our readers and make for a less enjoyable experience for us. That being said the topic specificness of the blog means we tend to rank fairly well for almost anything in our core area of interest.

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