Every blogger understands the never-ending search for traffic and the right keywords. Keywords or keyword phrases are what people type into search engines when they are looking for information. They are vital to getting your content noticed. Choosing effective keywords can help your work connect with your target audience. How? Because they tell the search engine about your content, and sends readers to your website. This is how people find content, but how can you make sure they are running across your content? Our recent Twitter chat had us all talk about everything that goes into writing the perfect blog post that gets noticed. Here’s a brief recap of what our community has to say.

right keywords for an awesome post

Becoming SEO savvy

You may use plugins and follow the steps given to get SEO right but it is super hard to rank on keywords unless you keep posting regularly. Another concern was about the kind of content. It could be difficult to implement SEO into poetry, or other forms of Literature, maybe even in regional language. Choosing a niche can help sort this. Also, Google Search Console, Yoast, Marketmuse, Buzzsumo, SEMrush are favourite SEO tools.

Two favourite keywords for your blog

One way to understand keywords right for you is to scan your blog and figure out what you talk about the most. Your keywords could be found right there and is the best place to begin. For example, ‘book blog’ would be a keyword swimming amongst millions, but ‘best book blog in India’ could narrow down searches. Adding a spin to the keywords and posting consistently can help your blog rank.

Keyword first or blog post?

We also talked about whether the keyword or the blog post comes first. We can really go either way. If you have a topic in mind, you can think of the appropriate keyword. Sometimes a concept comes first followed by keyword and the post. There are even free online tools to generate keywords and titles. However we must remember that a  keyword can get you traffic but a well written post is what will keep your readers engaged and longer on the blog. So, they both have to blend really well.

You can use Buzzsumo for research, Quora for topic research, and keywordsEverywhere for keyword research. You could also use Google Keyword Planner or KeywordTool.io for keywords.

The finale

Most of us have a checklist of sorts before publishing our post. Adding the right tags, external and internal links, optimized images, catchy headline, having the keyword present no more than 4-5 times in the post are few doable pointers. And then you're on your way to making your post discoverable on the search engine!

SEO is an ongoing journey and we get better each time we apply a new learning. Catching a few seminars, tutorials, even a talk with fellow bloggers makes that journey interesting. Catch the entire chat here, maybe you can find your tribe too!

Looking for more Blogging related tips? Check this.