It’s a universal problem in today’s multi-tasking, 3-steps at a time world...so many emails in our inboxes; so many informational articles and worthwhile blogs to keep us in touch with what’s going on in our industry. But most of us share a common predicament… great information at our fingertips, but not enough time to explore it all!
Bloggers are Writers and Readers
A successful blogger is not just a writer, but a reader of other blogs as well. We need to know who’s writing what in the blogosphere. So, how do we solve this dilemma of too little time? We scan! Admit it - you know you do it too. We scan for headings that grab our attention and we read segments of articles that appear relevant to what we want or need to know. That’s why headings and keywords are so important to our blog posts!
Keywords and Sub-Headings Make Scanning Easier
Every word counts when you are trying to create a blog post that your audience will take time to read or scan and come back to your blog for more. So don’t overlook the significance of keywords and subheadings to break your content into easily scannable segments.
These Things Are All Important:
- Relevance - Choose your keywords carefully and make sure they are really the right ones your audience will search for to find you. Use the tools available that can help you with this, like SEOBook Keyword Suggestion Tool, which is free, and there are plenty of others.
- Placement - Where you put your keywords is an important matter. Put them in your title, headings and subheadings. Put them in your descriptions and your image title and alt tags if you use images. Keyword-rich titles will make your readers happy because they can scan them easily, and they will make you happy because search engines like them – a lot.
- Density - It is important to use your keywords as often as you can for SEO, but keyword stuffing is so yesterday, and nobody likes a keyword stuffer. So refrain from overusing your keywords to the point that your writing becomes awkward, and your intent is clearly to use the keyword as many times as humanly possible in one article.
Making what we write as reader friendly as we possibly can helps our readers (and scanners) by providing information that is easy to absorb, and it helps us because they just might want to come back to our blog to see what other helpful information we might share – quickly, of course!!
