In a previous post (How to Use Keywords) I covered the three broad categories of how keywords are used. In this one I will focus on how they are used in driving traffic. specifically I will give you a list of some of the most common ways in which you can include keywords to make your content more appealing to search engines.
As I have mentioned before, SEO is an 80 billion dollar per year industry. Naturally, this short article can’t cover it all in depth. This list is by no means a complete list, nor does it go into depth on each idea.
But…
Knowing about these tactics will put you way ahead of where you would be without them, and well ahead of 80% (or more) of the competition out there.
So without any further ado, I give you …
Over 30 Ways to Use Keywords to drive traffic
I lied: 1 more further ado. These are all ways to drive traffic, but not all of them drive it directly to your site. Some drive it to something that will in-turn drive it to your site.
On web pages and posts
- Titles
- Subtitles
- Headings
- Subheadings
- In the first sentence
- In the first paragraph
- Throughout the body of your text
In other words. Everywhere you can. But don’t be spammy about it (see my note at the end of this post).
In the early millennial years I had a site which sold an item targeted to lifeguards. I thought it would be a good idea to drive traffic if I wrote about things they cared about. One was about obtaining a CPR certification. I did a great job. For several months we ranked higher than the AMerican Red Cross for the phrase ” How to get a CPR certification).
That was dumb. It was good content actually, but it did us no good. We didn’t get a single sale from it. It may have done Amazon some good because it listed some books, but I was not an affiliate. And there was certainly no good reason we should have a higher rank that the Red Cross.
I overused keywords and was rewarded for it with useless traffic. Those days are gone. Such behavior is no longer rewarded, it is penalized.
My point is that yes you should use keywords in all the ways I listed above, but only if it provides some use to the reader – or at the very least not a distraction from what they are there for.
In-site content that people are mostly unaware of
- Meta Descriptions – it’s that couple lines that comes up in search results that you sometimes don’t see when you read the page you link to. It can repeat the first few lines of your content or you can write your choice of text.
- URLs – the web address of the page. The last part of it is called the “post slug” or “page slug”
- Link text – use the keywords instead of just “here”. (Like: “Click to see a list of apples” rather than “click here”)
- Anchor text in links – when you link from one part of a page to another part of the same page
- Internal links (page to page) – linking to related content within your blog/site gets you a little boost
- Post tags – kind of like hashtags for your content. They are there to make the content easier to find.
Site Navigation
- Site name – Something like TheBashfulBlogger if you’re writing a blog about blogging
- Category names
- Site Map (or table of contents) – I do not have this simply because my sight isn’t so huge it needs one (yet). These are still used to some extent, but not as much as before. There was a time when you needed to do things like that to make sure Google saw all you content. Now WordPress does a pretty good job of letting them know as you post or update posts
Images
- File names – GalaApple.jpg for example
- Alt text – the text people see if the image fails to load. Also the text blind people may hear if they choose. Sometimes you can see it if you hover your mouse over an image.
- Image title and descriptive text
- Text within the image itself – not that much of an effect on rank to be honest
- The image itself regardless of any text – Artificial intelligence is everywhere. Some or all of the search engines will be using it to identify subjecvt matter of images.
Other websites
- Inbound link text
- Inbound link data for clickable images – all the stuff that is good for images on your site is also good for clickable image links that direct users to your site/page.
- Directories – when it makes sense and the directory is well regarded. A New York Pizza Directory would be great for a slice shop in Brooklyn, but not so great for an apple orchard in Washington, or an SEO company anywhere.
NOTE: do not trade reciprocal links with people just to drive traffic. Do not post your links on sites just to drive traffic. Do not post your links on comment sections just to drive traffic. For the love of all that is holy, don’t buy inbound links (or followers or likes). Do not go from years of no inbound links to dozens of inbound links all at once.
Google and other search engines are in the business of providing good search results. They don’t like being played any more that we do. And they have the resources to check for people gaming the system. Trust me, they don’t reward you for that behavior
ยง On Social Media
- User Name
- Profile description
- Post titles
- Post text
- Hashtags
- Images (and wall that goes with that)
- Video Captions
- Playlist names
- Pinterest board names
It really depends on the social media platform in question, but they all have several places to include keywords. Basically, if you want to drive traffic you should assume that any time you are typing there is a potential opportunity to include keywords.
That’s not all
Those are literally the ones I could think of in 5 or ten minutes of typing. As you progress through your online marketing adventure you will continually be finding new ways to use the keywords you identify.
No one thing on this list will guarantee you high rankings, but the cumulative effect of several of them is greater that the sum of its individual parts.
Note: You shouldn’t have to force keywords where they don’t belong. If it feels unnatural to use them somewhere, don’t.
And you do not have to use the same keyword everywhere. In fact, don’t do that. Regardless of how search engines interpret it, readers will get annoyed. Or to put it another way, perfect placement of keywords cannot replace or cover up bad content.
Here’s an example of what NOT to do if you want to rank for the keyword phrase “Jersey Shore Style Lemonade”. There is no such thing as far as I know – which is why I chose it as an example. So here’s what not to do…