Keywords, Labels, tags and other blog tools

If you do any kind of online marketing, you know that keywords play an important part in the ranking of your blog or website within the search engines.

When you conduct a keyword research, your ultimate goal is to learn how your prospective customer is using the search engines to find the information or products that they are seeking.

For best results, use keywords within all of your content, especially the first paragraph and preferably in the first sentence.

Of course, beware of overusing them. There's nothing I hate more than going on a site where every other word is a keyword.

Duh- overkill!

If you're not sure what keywords you should be using, there are many free online sources that can help you out.

One I like is:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal


On the prompt : “Enter a web page URL to find keywords related to the content on the page” type in your blog url and click on “Get Keyword Ideas”.

You will see different keywords and which are the most popular.

Now you can choose which words to add to your content.

Equally important are labels, tags and categories.

With Blogger, you can add labels at the bottom of every post. If you check this post, it will have words such as work at home, keywords,labels,tags,categories and more...

You can add that list to your sidebar in the form of a list or "cloud". If you don't wish to have them taking up space on your side bar, it is available on the "edit posts" page.

When you are ready to publish a post, make sure you have as many labels as you can- a least as many as Blogger allows..

In  the past I didn't use the label option as much as I should have.

For example, just this morning, on my "mom blog", I was looking for a certain post.

My son is graduating soon and we wanted some pics to put on his invitation. I knew when he turned 18 yrs old,  I did a post about that and it had a pic of his 1st day of school on there.

I searched my site for Golden Child, his "name" on my blog. No results.....

I tried the word "son"- No results....

Duh... I tried birthday- BINGO! Found it.

If I had put all 3 words, I would have found it faster.

Granted, I could have dug around until I came up with the date of the post, but a search is faster IF you have the right labels!

Labels can also assist you in finding old posts that you want to link to.

In WordPress, you have the options to add categories and tags.

Each post can be put in a category as well as have "tags" assigned to it, much like labels in Blogger.

Tags can link to a generated page that lists all of the posts on your site related to that specific tag.

Categories are the "subjects" that you talk about.

Whats the difference?

Generally, categories can have longer names, while tags are only a word or two.

Categories don’t help search engines find information, while Tags help search engines and tag directories catalog your site.

So which should you use?

Since they each have a specific function, I would say- use them all!

Just be careful you don't overdo!

Did you know?

There have been 133,000,000  blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002 !

There are over 900,000 –  blog posts published in a 24 hour period

With numbers like that, you need to use all the tools available to you.


Until next time.....

Have a great Sunday!