The Key to SEO

The importance of keywords and phrases

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) incorporated by making use of keywords and phrases within the content one is publishing on a blog, became more important in recent time. Essentially, SEO keywords and phrases are words that make it possible for a website to be found through search engines. Ideally, the words reflect the searching behavior of the audience that will potentially visit the website.

These keywords need to be incorporated in a variety of ways:

• the page’s text
• the page's title
• the URL
• meta tags and meta description
• image paths and image alt text

Although it seems to attractive to overwhelm the page with keywords, the modern search algorithms demand keywords to be of relevance. The motto is the more relevant, the better.

Applying the theory

When applying this to the blog, I made considerable use of the SEO optimization plug-in and this page, both of which helped to identify areas for improvement. I started by creating content around a topic that fits to the theme of my blog Landscape Photography 101. My latest post is about the perks of the RAW file format for landscape photography.

Within this post I focused on the keyword ‘RAW’ and tried to incorporate it meaningfully in the content, headlines, and the page titles. This led to a keyword density of 2.59%, which is considered to be great. Also, the images were optimized to feature the keyword in the alt text and path. The meta tags, which represent the website in the search engine’s results, were optimized to feature the keyword and a call to action. Additionally, links were incorporated and the minimum word amount of 300 exceeded. 

I have done the same for the other post, the about page, and I changed the meta tags of my blog. On top of that I connected Google Analytics with the blog, so that I can analyze the relevance of my content for visitors.