How to Use Keywords in Blog Posts for Better Results

Whilst you may already have downloaded our FREE blog post checklist and installed the Yoast SEO plug-in onto your site, you might well still find it confusing understanding how best to use keywords in your posts.

A number of you have asked me what the best way to use keywords in blog posts is, and so below I am going to provide you with some key tips. Okay here goes!

Write Naturally but Include LSI Terms

The first and most important thing I want to tell you about writing for the web is that you need to write naturally!

You are, in other words, first and foremost writing for your readers. For your followers.

Your content needs to make sense and be a smooth and easy read. So, you do NOT want to stuff keywords into your posts that look and read unnatural. Otherwise, you will turn your readers off.

Secondly, you will want to appeal to search engines and to greatly increase the chance of your site showing high in search results. It is here that what is termed LSI becomes very useful and important. Let me explain:

Using and Understanding LSI

LSI, when used for blogging, refers to Latent Semantic Indexing. Now do not worry if that sounds complicated because it’s not.

In essence, LSI is simply about including related terms in your blog post.

So if your post is about chocolate, you might want to include terms and headings, and sub-headings such that relate to your term ‘chocolate’.

In this case, terms such as ‘dark’, ‘candy’, ‘milk’, ‘history of chocolate’ and so on might be worth considering, given that they are related to ‘chocolate.

What you will find most of the time though, is that, if you are writing great content, then you will very likely naturally include many of these terms.

So LSI when blogging is really all about making sure that you include related terms. This is important because search engines expect LSI words to be used.

Why?

Because the use of LSI words tells a search engine such as Google that your post is clearly themed around a certain topic and that the post is likely to be higher quality because the terms that naturally come up for this topic, are there included on the page.

If you are writing about holidays and creating a post on ‘holiday in Cuba’ then try and include terms such as ‘Havana’, ‘salsa’, and so on. I think you get the picture right?!

Here are some tools you can use to find LSI-related terms for your web page:

• LSI Graph
• Or look at the ‘Google Suggests’ terms as you begin to type a phrase into a Google search
• Also, read about how to find the best keywords that we wrote.

In the example above, you can see what happens when I started to type the word ‘chocolate’ into a Google search. After typing the letters ‘choco’ Google already provides a number of suggestions.

You can use these suggestions to identify related words to use in your post.

Where to Include the Terms and Keywords

Okay. So now you have lots of terms you want to include in a blog post but how and where exactly do you include them in the blog post, and whilst making the writing natural?

A great question!

One of the first ways is to use your headings correctly.

First Step – Using Your Headings Correctly

With WordPress Guttenberg, a lot of things have got much easier for writing web content and for including keywords in posts.

To see how you have used heading tags in WordPress Gutenberg, you click the ‘i’ icon at the top of your post.

By viewing your heading tags as you compose or edit a blog post you are writing, you can quite easily now see the headings tags listed together.

This enables you to sculpt your headings for the post so that they include keywords and to make sure the headings follow some logical sequence.

In other words, for the key terms, you want to include in your post, you can view and easily structure the header 2 and 3 tags in a natural way, by checking the headings you’ve made and by then adjusting them as needed.

Include your keywords in some of these headers!

Second Step – Rewriting Content to Include LSI

You may well have already written a bunch of blog posts or just finished a new one, and now that you are becoming aware of LSI terms, you want to include more related terms.

• Just do a search for new terms using the tools already mentioned in this post or use Google Suggest or Pinterest (see our post on using Pinterest to find keyword terms or you can also view Brian Dean’s keyword research guide).
• Then proceed to re-proof your post and if, for example, you use the term ‘car’ 10 times, consider using variations of related terms. You might want one time to say ‘automobile’, ‘auto’ or ‘vehicle’. Use a variety of LSI terms and not just one each time.

Using Your Page Titles

You might already be using the Headline Analyzer tool to create headlines that have impact and get click-throughs.

One thing you can also often do with headlines though is to add in a couple of extra related terms at the end of your headline.

Whilst the start of your headline is vital to get right, adding 1 to 2 keywords at the end of the headline can be an easy way to use related terms in a key spot on your blog posts.

For example, ’10 Best Fat Burning Diets‘ could become ‘10 Best Fat Burning Diets and Recipes‘ or ‘ 10 Best Fat Burning Diets and Meal Plans‘.

Image Names

When naming images, make sure to include keywords relating to the image and your page, in the image name.

The image below, which is on our corporate training website, for example, is on a page about time management for business. So we named the image ‘business-time-management.jpg’.

Another example. Here’s myself and Valeria (the two of us who run Promarketingonline) and we are at an SEO Marketing Convention.

If I were including this image as I have below, then the image name can be ‘seo-marketing-convention.jpg‘.

Note: Do make sure that the image name is genuinely related to the image itself.

Content Size

One of the easiest ways to include a lot of related LSI terms and terminology that are relevant to the page you are writing is to write more content!

Bloggers such as Neil Patel who have analyzed post length, tell us that 1,850 to 2,000 words is the ideal word count for a post.

Many bloggers, these days, also try to do a couple of 3.000 to 10,000 words for key articles.

Certainly, it is so much easier to have space to include lots of keyword-rich titles if the content you write reaches around 2000 words.

2000 words is actually also a very natural length if you are talking about a subject in some detail, using your expertise in your niche to break down and explain something.

With WordPress, it is very easy to view your word count as you create a blog post.

Page Title and Description

You will also want to make sure that you add your keywords and terms in the page title and description for every page or post you create.

If you use the Yoast SEO plugin, this will be easy to do. Just scroll down to the bottom of your post/page and click the Meta Title and Description boxes (see image below) and enter a natural sentence for the title and description.

Do consider though that the text at the start of the meta title and description (from left to right) is the most important. So use the most related words at the start of the meta title and description.