Your mind burns feverishly as you craft your unique message to the world. With painstaking diligence, you pour years of education and training into the article. Even with your obvious bias, you know how important the message will be to the right people. It has potential to change lives for the better and this is your motivation. Once finished, you reread your masterpiece with a degree of satisfaction, careful to dot every “i” and cross every “t.” Ok, it’s done!
Now, you carefully roll up the scroll, slip it into the bottle, replace the cork and toss it overboard into the rolling sea. There!
Surely the world will be a different place! Such is the plight of those who intend to be seen online, but don’t understand the critical nature of keyword research. You have no prayer of being seen without it. Of course, you could get lucky. We’ve all heard the legends of those who’ve had luck with messages in bottles. The Police even got millions of messages in return, as the song testifies.
Still, I think I’ll throw my hat in with those who favor diligent keyword research. Here are some guidelines that will put your site in front of relevant readers who are searching for information that you provide.
1. Identify medium traffic, low competition keywords. They get traffic AND you have a chance to rank for them.
2. Make sure to include your keyword in the title, body, description and header tags. Don’t spam your page with too many keyword mentions. Besides being silly, it doesn’t help in the search engines results anyway.
3. Test your keywords for commerciality if you want to make money online. There are keywords that don’t make money. “Jokes” for example, doesn’t produce income for anyone in spite of achieving millions of searches every month. People are looking for something free when they search for jokes, quotes, history, etc…
