Keyword Research and SEO for Beginners
Welcome to the Keyword Research and SEO for Beginners course.
Introduction!
Keyword Research and SEO for Beginners
We will be covering this blog post process throughout this mini course.
Why do we find keywords?
We are choosing a keyword because we want to know something is searched by people.
We are choosing a keyword to tell people and search engines what our content is about.
We are picking keywords to target our audience.
You Need One Main Keyword
You need at least one main keywords.
We suggest 1 that has less than 50 QSR and a SEO score of 90 or above.
Put Your Main Keyword In Yoast
You will have one main keyword, this will be the one that you put into Yoast.
You will then use backup keywords to support the post.
This will help you to rank for multiple keywords instead of just one!
Jaaxy a lot of time will return to you multiple suggestions for your keyword, this is a good opportunity to sprinkle some other relevant words people are searching throughout your post.
These backup keywords need to be tight and they need to be relevant to the main keyword. Sprinkle these back up keywords in areas like the text, image file names and alt tags.
You backup keywords must stay tightly relevant to the main keyword and topic.
Where to Put Your Main Keyword
- Blog post title
- First title on the page
- In the first few sentences of your blog post.
- At least one subtitle
- In the text a few places naturally
- In at least one image file name and the alt tag for that image
Where to Put Back-Up Keywords
- In the text naturally
- In the subtitles (this is good for your TOC plugin if you’re using one)
- In image file names and alt tags
Related Article: Blog Post SEO Checklist
Keyword Researching
The keyword tool that you see us using in these videos is Jaaxy.
You need a keyword tool! Without all the stats, you are shooting in the dark. Jaaxy is the prefferred keyword tool of the Pajama Affiliates because it easy to use, faster to return results and has a lot more capabilities to track keywords than others tools do. You can use any keyword tool you like, we’re only showing you our preferred method. 🙂
Alphabet Soup to get Keyword Ideas
Stop Words
Related Article: What are Stop Words?
Using a Table Of Contents Plugin
A Table of Contents Plugin gives you “jump to” links in Google, they’re great for SEO and SERPS.
Image Optimization
All blog posts should use at least one unique image. We have image tutorials in our beginner’s blogging course if you need help in this area. You can also post in our FB support group for ideas. Images rank in search engines as well as add visual appeal to your blog post. YOU NEED THEM! Please use at least one.
Your images that you’re using on your website need to be optimized for search engines.
Each post should have it’s own set of keywords (as discussed above), at least on of your images on your blog post needs to use the main keyword as the file name as well as in the alt tag description.
The rest of your images (if you have more) need to also have relevant keyword file names and alt tags.
Image file names and image ‘alt tags’ are a good place to use keywords that don’t make sense from a grammar standpoint for the reader. Words that are missing stop-words for example.
Related Article: Blog Post Images – Why They Matter So Much!
Finding Buyer Keywords
- Look for questions that you can answer with your topic.
- Find problems you can offer solutions too.
- Long tail keywords are great for information based posts.
Examples of Buyer Keywords
These examples are from Lesley’s blog
This topic is covered in great detail in the upgrade part of our keyword bonus.
****Finding Product Review Keywords
- Find a generic way to say your product, a lot of time people don’t know exact names when they search.
- Go for the low hanging fruit, less than 50 QSR (competing pages) and the higher the SEO score, the better.
- Find a way to add words like “GOOD, TOP, COOL, INTERACTIVE” and similar adjectives to your keyword.
A great question from Shelia in our group:
Be Different, Be You, Show Personality!
Search engines have changed dramatically and if you want to rank for a product keyword you need to give it your all. The days of finding a product keyword and throwing up 300 generic words is over. You need to out rank some major competitors who also want to sell products to people, so you need to be different!
How can you be better at product reviews?
KNOW YOUR TOPIC which we discussed above. You absolutely need to have some value to offer the reader. Search engines are very smart and they get just get better and better all the time. Generic, keyword stuffed, spun content just isn’t good enough to rank highly anymore. You need to be different, you need to have something that makes you stand out!
Do not just ramble off 300 words of nonsense to target a keyword and fill a void. When you own a product or really love a product you should have some unique things to say about it. What makes you stand apart? Why should Google rank you on page one? Ask yourself these things!
Look at the Questions People are Asking About a Product!
For product reviews, read the questions people are asking about the product on Amazon. Even if that’s not the affiliate you are using, Amazon a lot of products and they have an area with just customer questions. Read those questions and see how you can uniquely bring up their concerns and answer them on your blog.
Amazon Questions are located next to the products customer reviews
Find Out What People are Asking About Your Product
Answering people’s questions about a product in your product review will
- educate the reader
- help you rank for more long-tail keywords
- give you more content
Website Navigation and SEO
Related Article: What Does Good SEO on a WordPress Blog Look Like?
Navigation of a site is a big ranking factor in SEO. Readers (and bots) should be able to navigate your website easily. It should be clear what sort of website that your reader is on right away.
Website Categories
Categories on your website are for grouping blog post topics together, they can be broad so that they can encompass a lot of your blog posts into them.
The categories on your website should be relevant to the website as a whole.
Categories are a place for you to put content that pertains to that category.
You should not have a category with just one post. A user should be able to click on your category and find more relevant content.
An example could be an Authentic Mexican Food Recipe blog – there could be categories for Mexican breakfast, Mexican lunch, Mexican dinner, and Mexican desserts. The site is about Mexican food, the categories are relevant to the website as a whole.
You want to be specific with your categories, not too generic. If you category is just one word, you may want to define it more.
The above for example would not just be lunch, breakfast, dinner and desserts.
You want to be descriptive yet brief.
On this site for example, if I wanted to have a category for traffic, I would not just use the word traffic. I would use, get more visitors, or drive traffic to website.
I am not concerned about seo so much on categories as I am not going to rank for a high competitive keyword like traffic anyway.
There is no magic number of categories one should have but remember to keep the site tight and relevant.
Start out with only a few categories to begin with and stay within them for awhile to build authority on your site.
If you do have multiple categories that are not relevant to one another on your website, you need to start defining them on your site. This means take a couple topics you really love and start filling them out, interlinking them and becoming more of an authority within them.
It’s best to have fewer categories with a lot of content than lots of categories with very little content.
If you have a lot of categories, chances are good that you are trying to appeal to too many people at one time.
Related Video: How I’m Interlinking on My Blog
Is It Okay To Put A Blog Post In Multiple Categories?
A blog post ideally should only fit into one category. If it fits into multiple categories, you may need to tweak or merge your categories.
Putting one post into multiple categories dilutes your seo.
If a post doesn’t seem to fit into any category, do not create a new category for that one post.
Category Basics
- It’s best to have a category with a lot of posts not a category with few posts
- Try not to lump blog posts into multiple categories. Pick one most relevant and put it there.
- Too many categories may mean you need to narrow down
- Categories should be short enough not to be cumbersome, yet descriptive enough for your reader to understand
- Categories should be visible on your website. Either in the menu or sidebar.
- You can link inside of a post to a category page if it makes sense.
Intro To Tags and Categories
In the video below I give you a basic overview of your categories and tags. I also cover some concerns about the related post plugin and share a tip to keep Visitors on your site Longer.
Website Tags
The tags on your website are like the index in the back of book. If you use the same tag because the tag is relevant to two posts, the two posts will be on the same tag page.
Tags can be used to micro-categorize your website. I, Lesley, do this because my site as a whole is broad. Toys is not a micro niche and in order to narrow it down for my readers, I use tags.
Multiple posts can use the same tag. For example, if I write about “Paw Patrol Vehicle Toys” 8 or 9 times, I will use that same tag for all those posts because they are all relevant one another. (you will see this in my video about interlinking below)
Tags Can Interlink a Series Of Blog Posts
Let’s say you are taking a journey.
Maybe you are starting a diet and you write a post every two weeks with your results.
You could use the same tag on all of the posts and then on each post you could write a blurb something like follow my keto journey here and link to that tag page.
*Your reader would then find all of those post on one page. Nice way to keep them reading longer.
Want to get the most out of your tag pages? Get in our Pajama Affiliates VIP!
Basics Of Using Tags In A Blog Post
1. A tag is not necessarily a keyword. Many think a tag is a list of keywords. It’s really not.
2. A tag is like the index in the back of a book. You look up a word in a book and it will reference several pages that have relevant info to that word or set of words.
3. Considering #2 above, a tag’s purpose is to group similar posts together, not to be confused with categories.
4. When you add a tag to your post, it creates a new page. That being said, if you only have one post that the tag applies too, your tag page holds little value. Best not to even tag it at all.
5. Don’t duplicate your categories into tags.
6. You can link to your tag pages in your posts to give your reader more info on a narrower subject.
7. Do not display your tags on your site. Tags are for internal navigation.
Related Video: My Super Awesome SEO TIP
Related Article: WordPress Tags and Categories
Let’s Clean Some House!
Bulk Move
How to Clean Up Your Tags with no 404 errors
The above two video are using free plugins.
If you want an easier way, Yoast Premium which is $89.00 per year will make redirects much more simple.
A Few Tips and Tricks
Interlinking on Your Blog
Interlinking Part 2
How to Interlink Blog Posts, Categories, Pages, and Tags
Interlinking your blog posts, pages, categories and even tags is good search engine optimization for your website as a whole.
Interlinking helps search engines crawl your site as well as direct readers to stay on your site by sending them over to another post or page on the site for more information.
>> Interlink blog posts using the focus keyword (of the blog post you are linking too).
>> Interlink pages, categories and tags using the name of the category or something tightly related and relevant.
Interlinking is different for everyone. You might find yourself interlinking to a lot of posts more than pages or categories and that’s okay. Some interlink their tags to bring more broad categories tightly together, that’s okay. The most important thing to remember when you’re interlinking is to keep it relevant for the reader.
Do NOT interlink topics and posts that have nothing to do with one another just for the sake of interlinking. This doesn’t help you at all. For example, don’t interlink a Halloween costume page to Aunt Betsy’s Thanksgiving stuffing recipe because they have nothing to do with one another. Two different topics, two different holidays – very irrelevant to one another.
Interlinking blog posts is a must if you are going to become and authority on a topic.
Using Social Media
If you have Pinterest and Google+ account, this video will help you. A simple share on G+ and Pinterest can get you indexed quicker than just publishing your blog post and waiting for search engines to crawl it.
[s3mv]CR-AF-KW-SEO-social-share-tips.mp4,false,false[/s3mv]
You can find out social media sizes on Canva.com, it’s a free image editor that will allow you to create rockstar images with little experience.
Social media traffic makes a large portion of my traffic, so once you feel ready, it’s definitely worth your time to set up social media accounts. There’s no way you can be a social media buff on every platform, so you’re going to have to think about where your time is best spent. For myself and my niche, Pinterest and Google+ are good platforms for me. For a niche like Robin has, Facebook plays a big role.
