Keyword SEO 2024: Keyword SEO is very important for your online business and service-related blogs or website. In this tutorial we shall discuss in detail about the best SEO practice in 2024 to focus unique keywords including long-tail keyword tool research and implementation.
What is a keyword?
Concept of Keyword: A keyword is a single word or multiple words (phrase) that describe the contents on a particular webpage or blog post. In other words, a search term used in search engine say Google to find out information is called keyword. Similarly, keyword or search term also known as search query from users point of view.
Thus, the same word or phrase known differently as below:-
- For Site owner=> Keyword
- For Search Engine=> Search term
- For Users=> Query
A website owner wants users to visit on page using that query or keyword or search term in Google. I think you now understand keyword meaning. Now, let us discuss why keyword is so important for a site.
Why are keywords important?
Importance of Keyword: Using search term (query), Google’s Search algorithms sort through hundreds of billions of webpages to show the most useful results on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
That search term is actually a keyword which helps Google to find out related webpages in search index. On the other hand, the keyword tells search engine about the content on the webpage.
If you are using the exact keyword people searching for, within the contents on your webpage then the organic traffic on your site will automatically increase. As a result of which your webpages shall rank higher and appear on the top of search results.
So, keyword is important for all three of you i.e. webpage (as keyword), visitors (as query) and search engine (as search term). Your site traffic will increase, search engines will understand what are you talking about and your users will get for what they are looking for.
Categories and Keyword
Using Category as Keyword: Optimizing your articles for same keyword will hurt your ranking rather use category page for all similar posts. Suppose, you are writing tutorial posts for making money online then use category “make money online” and use this to archive all relates posts for earning online methods.
Domain and Keyword
Using Domain as Keyword: In my opinion domain name has no relation with the keyword. It is not necessary that your domain name must have keyword rather it should be unique and not related to other’s identity.
Domain name helps to identify your brand name which is used to differentiate your website from others.
Brand and Keyword
Using Brand Name as Keyword: Did you know? Your brand is also a keyword that can be used while searching. If you search for “internal linking SEO” then it may be possible that you will not see any post from our site within top 5 of SERPs. But, if you use search term “internal linking SEO by Showeblogin”, you will see search results from our website on the top. You may call is as “Website Mention or Webmention” which helps your site rank high and boost organic traffic.
It happens because of our brand name “Showeblogin”. Whatever you will search using our brand name you will see our articles (if related to search term) on SERPs.
Homepage of your site is to be used for branding purpose. You should not optimize your homepage for another keyphrase. Additionally, you should use your brand name at the end of each posts title tags.
For Example: this webpage title is “SEO Keyword – Best Practice in 2024 | Showeblogin“.
Keyphrase and Keywords
Using Phrase as Keyword: Key phrase is a Long-tail Keyword which results more specific information on SERPs.
Did you know what exactly is the difference between keyword and key phrase? Keyword is single word whereas keyphrase is a combination of words. E.g. SEO is keyword and Backlink SEO is keyphrase.
Both keyphrase or keywords should describe the contents of your webpage. Keywords have very tough competition in ranking in compare to keyphrase or long-tail keywords.
Long-tail Keyword
Long-tail Keyword is keywords that are more specific to the topic or contents of your blog post. Actually, long-tail keyword completes the target for your niche blog post.
It results less search results i.e. you will get fewer organic traffic to your webpage. However, the long-tail keywords generate high conversion value resulting more revenue for your product and services.
That is why, I strongly recommend my clients to use long-tail keywords on their product pages and service-related blog posts.
It may be possible that organic traffic is not coming for query or long-tail keywords users search for on Google. It happens when your site might not have enough useful content relevant to focus keywords.
Focus Keyword
What is Focus Keyword?
A focus keyword is a keyword you want your post to rank for. It is a specific keyphrase used for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for an article.
Choosing a focus keyword is an essential step for SEO. Sometime site owner chooses it twice in case they notice that an old article was not ranking for the same.
Why Focus keywords?
Well! This is very important question while you are writing high quality contents for your website. Focus keyword helps you to identify a particular webpage from all posts on your website.
This prevents you from keyword cannibalization and helps to write unique articles for your site. In case you are not using focus keyword in your webpage, you will not be able to differentiate it from other posts and it creates confusion that which article have been optimized for which search term or user query.
You should always remember one thing that the best practice is that never use focus keyword as anchor text for external linking on your posts.
Using Focus keyword Multiple times
Cornerstone articles contain only one focus keyword. Same focus keyword should not be used for two or more articles.
Because, you can’t optimise your two webpages for the same search term or search query. I mean to say that you don’t want to compete with your own articles for getting top position on the search results. Am I right?
Article with Multiple keywords
That is something different and it happens generally even you had not work for it. Single article may rank for the two or more keywords you have not optimized your post for. This is because the users search for the similar topic and Google finds your contents useful for them and show it on the top of SERPs.
Optimization of your webpage for multiple keywords is cool and it works. You may call it alternate keyword or synonymous that you want to show for the top search result pages.
Keyword Cannibalization
Focus keyword is used only once on your entire website otherwise your rankings might suffer from keyword cannibalization.
It may be possible that various webpages of the same website are ranking for the same search term. It is possible due to optimization of contents of those webpages with the same keyword. It is also possible that those articles are very similar to each other.
However, I noticed that if a site has high authority then Google might show two or three articles from that website for the same focus keyword.
But actually, it is bad for SEO as I told you that you will competing with yourself for ranking position on SERPs. Those similar articles using same focus keyword will position lower rank.
Therefore, you should fix the cannibalization issue as soon as possible. To fix cannibalization issue, you may choose one of them to keep and delete the other. The contents of those articles should be merged and redirect the deleted page to the one you keep.
How to find keywords? Choose right focus keyword
SEO Keyword Tool: Keyword research plays very crucial role for deciding which keyphrase would be your focus keyword for your current webpage.
Your keywords strategy will help you to choose the right focus keyword. First of all, know what people are searching for. Thereafter, Analyse such keyphrase to know its search volume and ranking difficulties. Finally, you will get focus keyword for your post.
There are a wide range of SEO services available, from basic keyword research and on-page optimization to more complex link building and content marketing campaigns. There are various free as well as paid keyword tools available online for keyword research. You may use the following most popular SEO keyword tool:
- Google Adwords Keyword Planner,
- Ubersuggest,
- Keyword Research Tool,
- Answer The Public,
- MOZ Keyword Explorer; and
- Ahrefs Keywords Explorer.
How to use Keyword?
You should write for your users and not for search engine. Keyword is very important for SEO but use it very precisely in your post and pages. Don’t use it in every sentence or paragraph and make sure the same are well-distributed throughout your contents of a page or post.
You may consider the following points while using keywords in your blog posts:
- Keyword in post title: Use keyword at the beginning of your title tag.
- Keyword in Excerpt: Focus keyword should be within the summary, introduction or description of your blog posts.
- Keyword in Heading Tags: Write keyword in sub-headings l(H2, H3 and H4) of your tutorials. It does not mean that you should use focus keywords in every headings or sub-headings. One or two heading may include your focus keywords.
- Keyword in paragraphs: Using keywords in paragraphs are also helpful for Google to show exact result for users directly from your paragraphs as excerpts on SERPs.
- Image and Video: If you are using video, image or infographics into you contents then try to use keyphrase in their name.
Number of keywords to be used is actually depends on the length of your article. But it is fair to use 5-7 times same keyword for an article of up to 1000-1500 words.
You may use related keywords and synonyms of your keyword. Synonyms and alternative words are recognizable by Google and another search engine.