Day 8: More SEO Article Writing

Determining what keywords to use in your articles is probably the most time consuming part of the SEO article writing process, but it is also the most rewarding.

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By choosing and using the right combination of words, you can attract an enormous amount of attention online that otherwise would be focused elsewhere.

First, look at all of the words that you could use to describe your product or service. About ten or so should do. If you cannot think of ten, take a look at either your website’s meta tags or your competitor’s meta tags by opening up the webpage in your browser and then viewing the source (View ? Source in Internet Explorer). Open the file in a text editor (such as Notepad) and scroll down to where you see the words “meta tags”. Review the list of words there and add or delete words to your list as required.

Once you have a list, open up your favorite spreadsheet program and place all of the individual words in a column to themselves. Label this column Keywords. Now label the next columns, in order, Searches, Competition, KEI and Notes.

Once you’ve finished, open up a free keyword selector tool such as this one and plug in the first of your keywords. Click on the analyze button and in a couple of seconds you’ll have a large list of words related to the keyword you chose. Quickly scan them and add any word (or word combinations) that interest you to your list. Then look at the “searches this month” total (in this case, the higher the better; anything less than a 100 should be omitted for now). Add whatever number appears to the corresponding keyword(s) in the Searches column.

Next, open up your favorite search engine and plunk in the first keyword on your list with apostrophes surrounding it. As an example, if your keyword is animal trainer, you would type “animal trainer” into the search engine. Take a look at the number of websites returned that match your keywords and then type that number into your Competition column. These are the websites that have targeted the same keywords you are reviewing, and therefore they are your direct competition. The fewer competitors you have for any given keyword, the better.

Now it’s time to type in a calculation into the KEI column that calculates the square of the Searches number divided by the Competition. Stated another way, if Searches is the B column and Competition is column C and you are calculating the KEI of the second row, your calculation would look like this: =B2*B2/C2. Copy and paste this calculation into each KEI column and a number should appear.

Sort your spreadsheet by the KEI column in descending order (so the highest numbers are at the top). Your best keywords are now quite obvious: the higher the KEI the better (anything with a score of over 50 is good and anything with a score over 1,000 is excellent), and the less competition the better. Therefore, if you have a keyword that offers a score of 534 but it has over a million competitors, choose another instead.

Now that you have a list of keywords that are enticing both to your potential readers and the search engines, it’s time to learn what to do with those keywords in your articles.