The most important element on your site for SEO (search engine optimization) is your post title. Search engines put the most weight on article importance in that title. Next when people read said title and they can see that is what they are looking for they click on it. So keep your titles basic and to the point.
Which words to use?
I wrote a post about resizing photos. When coming up with a final title for that post, I wanted to be sure to use the best words or search terms for people to find it. At first I thought “How to Resize Images” would work. But I wanted to be sure. So I went over to Keyword Tool to take a look at the number of searches. It turned out that the better word choice was “pictures” by about 30,000 more searches (use the local monthly column). That is the word I used.
Google analytics says the “How to Resize Pictures” post is number seven of my most viewed pages. I do believe that changing that one word gave it a little more edge in searches. Since the terms are so closely related, I also used both terms in the body of the post. That way if someone did search for “images” or even “photos” instead, the terms will appear in the search engines also.
Another benefit on checking the keyword searches, is that it can give you words that you might not have thought about including in your post. These other search terms might give you an added boost in search engines.
You don’t have to do a keyword search for every post. If you’ve taken the time to write a post for your site, then you might as well get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Right?
Another simple search tool you can try is Uber Suggest.
Next I’ll write about when you would want to use less popular search terms.
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