by Alyssa Ast
Believe it or not, but if you target the wrong keywords when you optimize your web content, you can drastically injure your search engine ranking. Many people choose keywords simply because they have the ideal hits number, but you can't solely base your keyword choice on the hits number alone. Targeting the wrong keywords will cause a search engine to struggle when indexing your content correctly. Plus, your traffic is likely to suffer as readers aren't able to find your site with poorly chosen keywords. Also, you're probably going to have a high bounce rate by targeting the wrong keywords.
There are 3 easy tips you can use to ensure you avoid targeting the wrong keywords:
- Relevancy- Choosing relevant keywords is the number one way to avoid targeting the wrong keywords. Your keywords must be relevant to your web content. If you use irrelevant keywords, you will end up targeting the wrong audience, who will find your page of no use and cause you to have a high bounce rate. Plus, search engines will index your content incorrectly. I can't stress enough the importance of choosing relevant keywords.
- Hits- After you have found a few keywords that are relevant to your content, make sure they have the ideal hits number. You want to choose words that don't have an excessively high hits number because that increases your competition. However, you don't want to choose keywords that have an excessively low hits number either because then it will be nearly impossible to maintain steady traffic. Depending on which keyword tool you use, your average hits number should be no more that 100 per day, yet no lower than 40 per day.
- Think like your reader- When choosing your keywords, think about words or phrases someone might use to find the information found within your content. There are numerous ways to say the same thing, so take some time to create a list of possible words and phrases that might be used, even if they aren't typical words or phrases you would use.
