How to find good keywords for your blog posts

One of the essential elements of SEO for bloggers is to have a keyword phrase that you’re targeting with your blog posts. It’s OK not to target a phrase with every post, but if you want to get traffic from the search engines, it’s wise to focus on keywords for at least half of your blog posts.

Strategically working this keyword into your title without sounding like a goofball is an art that requires a lot of practice, but the more you do it, the better you get at it. And with many blogs getting more traffic from social media than from Google, it’s a good idea to focus on creating a title that’s catchy and will do well on social media while including a keyword.

Finding Keywords

As far as finding keywords, I really like wordstream.com/keywords. It allows you to get 30 free searches to see if you like it.

I also still like and use wordtracker.com as my go-to site for keyword ideas.

Once you have your tool, you’ll want to search very generic and broad terms about your topic. Pay close attention to the long-tail (more than three to four words) phrases, because these are almost always going to be easier to rank for.

I often like to combine two to three long-tail phrases to create my title because it gives me an opportunity to rank for all three of them.

For example:

When I was creating an article that was going to be listing a bunch of budgeting spreadsheets, I began my keyword research by searching for “budgeting spreadsheet.” It was clear there were a ton of people searching for that phrase, but what was exciting was that there were a ton of long-tail related keywords, as well.

I noticed these long-tail phrases:

• Free budgeting spreadsheet
• Household budgeting spreadsheets

I then combined them and added a number to make it a list to create my keyword-targeted title “10 Free Household Budgeting Spreadsheets”.

After getting some links to this post, I not only began  ranking for these longer phrases, but over time, I began to rank for the original phrase “budgeting spreadsheet,” as well.