If you are maintaining a business blog (and you should be) you should be using keywords. Some used keywords are better than others and there are certain strategies you must be aware of to be found through search engines.

Most people approach a business blog using the “Field of Dreams” strategy.

If you build it, they will come. You also hope that they will come ready to spend money on your products and/or services. But an important factor is using keywords and that is often overlooked by people writing small business blogs.

First you need to find the keywords you want to use. But that is only the start of the battle. It’s an important part, but it’s only the beginning. What are people searching for? If you have a plumbing business are they searching for plumber, or fix pipes or maybe toilet repair? You have to explore all those phrases to come up with the right keywords to use in your article.

Secondly, once you have those keywords they need to be placed strategically in your article. Simply throwing the word toilet repair into a post ten times isn’t going to make magic happen. It’s not just the “beginning, middle end” strategy. You need to think about how close those words are to each other. Proximity is also searched for when the spiders crawl and search a site. So going with our example, you might want “Plumbing and toilet repair” rather than “Plumbing toilet repair.” Using the “and” separates the keywords. In the second example google groups those into one keyword rather than two. Close is good, too close is bad.

Third we want to remember density. Density is the percentage of times a keyword is in an article. Have you ever read an article that made sense, but instead of using pronouns they kept using the proper noun?

Example: When you repair a toilet, the toilet must be disconnected from the toilet water source.

That reads much more smoothly if you write: When repairing a toilet make sure it is disconnected from the water source.

The first example is using a technique called “keyword packing” and some people think it will help with their search engine ranking. That is not the case. You should have a “keyword density” somewhere between two and eight percent. (Plain English – for every hundred words you should have around 4 or 5 keywords. You want no less than 2 and no more than 8.)

Finally, how much do your keywords stand out? Their prominence is important, too. Do you use heading and subheadings in your articles? When spiders and bots crawl around a blog post they notice the use of headlines, so you want to think about using that feature a bit as you are creating. But again, you don’t want to overuse the headline feature in your business blog. That’s basically packing and doesn’t work.

If this sounds complicated, well, it is and it isn’t. The rules change fairly often, but they are simple. The problem comes in that unless you are doing this on a regular basis you have to keep referring to notes on what to do. That can become time consuming.

Using keywords in your business blog can generate results for your small business. As readers recognize you for your knowledge they will also know who to turn to when they have need of your services.

If all this sounds too complex, visit my home page. I am more than happy to create high value laser focused content for you.