Everything you ever wanted to know about SEO- Keywords

In the last article we discussed about what SEO is, why we need to know about it and how is a blog ranked on search engines. This article will walk you through the various ways through which you can optimize your blog for search engines.
The algorithms that search engines employ to rank websites are not public knowledge but in spite of it the factors that influence your blog’s rank are common knowledge. We will discuss about some of the most important factors that can help you optimize your blog for search engines.
Keywords: This is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. Keywords are the typed queries on the search engine that return your blog in the search results.

Having the correct keywords can make or break a blog.

Before optimizing your blog for keywords the first thing that needs to be done is to find out the right keywords you should target. The chosen keywords should complement your blog’s niche. Once you have decided on a list of target keywords make sure that there is a significant density of these keywords on your blog to get the search engines interested. The positioning of keywords is important, too, for example the presence of keywords at specific places like the title, sub titles, and URL carry more weight compared to a keyword appearing in the content. You should abstain from stuffing your blog with keywords just for the sake of a higher keyword density, keywords must be used judiciously, and also the search engines will penalize your site if you have too many keywords compared to the total amount of words. Having only one to two and a half percent of your words being key words or long tail-keywords is considered optimal.
Note: long-tail keywords can be entire phrases rather than specific words, for instance if you are looking to sell Facebook followers through your blog or site, instead of targeting the key word “Facebook”, you may look to target, the long-tail keyword “cheap Facebook followers”. Long-tail keywords are usually easier to rank for than just the base word itself.
We will dedicate an entire article to help you optimize your blog with the right keywords. Market Samurai is a great tool, which can help you optimize your site with the right keywords. We will discuss about the tool in more detail in one of our future posts.
Link building: A link from an external website to your blog is called an inbound link. Search engines, especially Google assign a lot of significance to inbound links. A greater number of inbound links is a sign of relevant and quality content. A link from a quality website is more significant compared to a link from a regular website. A link is considered to be of good quality if the external site has content similar to your blog and if the external site has multiple inbound links of its own. It is also possible to have links that add negative value to your site, so it is not always wise to simply buy tens of thousands of links at the lowest possible price. A few quality backlinks can have a much better affect of helping your site rank, and many thousands of poor links.
Content: It is extremely critical that your blog has original and amazing content, maintaining high-quality content will tempt bloggers from your niche to link to your blog which will result in additional inbound links and referral traffic for your blog. Spam content stuffed with keywords can adversely affect your search ranking because the search algorithms specifically filter out such content.
Custom domain and hosting: Blogs using custom domain names and hosts are more likely to appear on search results as opposed to their free counterparts, the reason being that bloggers subscribing to paid services are considered to be more serious and technically literate compared to bloggers using free platforms like Blogger.com and WordPress.com. In a lot of cases the paid hosts provide premium services, which include search engine optimization by SEO experts. Therefore it is often recommended that you go for custom domain and paid hosting.
Optimization: You can technically enhance your sites so that search engines are more receptive to your site.
Meta tags: These are HTML code snippets that are not visible to humans but are used by search engine crawlers to extract information like the description of the blog and the keywords it has been optimized for.
Site maps: this is an XML file consisting of a map of your site complete with URLs, which are provided to the crawlers so that they can intelligently crawl your site, in the best way possible.
Clean Codes: Search engines prefer blogs that are efficiently coded, have quick loading times, and no broken links.
All of the above mentioned factors, if implemented correctly, could greatly enhance your blogs ability to be ranked higher in the search engines. However one important point to note is that you should never abuse any of the above-mentioned techniques by over doing them because the search engines will often interpret this as keyword stuffing or spam

Ranking: 5