Blogging Challenge: Top 10 Keywords for Your Blog

The next blogging challenge in the ongoing series of Lorelle on WordPress Blogging Challenges is on keywords and search engine optimization (SEO).

List your top 10 keywords for your blog.

Part One – List Your Top 10 Keywords for Your Blog

This is a two-fold exercise. First, off the top of your head, write down the top ten keywords you think describe your blog. Keywords are words you use frequently in your blog that search engines look for as they crawl through your site, helping them categorize your blog’s content. They are also referred to as the words people typed into a search engine when they end up with your blog in their top search results.

For example, I would say that the top 10 keywords for Lorelle on WordPress would be:

1. wordpress
2. blog
3. blogging
4. writing
5. wordpress.com (wordpressdotcom)
6. tips
7. help
8. design
9. plugins
10. themes

Once you have your top 10 keywords for your blog, check your blog out. Look through your posts to see if your expectations about what you write about match the reality of the topics on your blog.

Search for your top ten keywords on your blog. Do you get a lot of search results? You can use Google to get a more specific search count by typing in the following with one of your keywords and your blog URL into the search form box:

keyword site:example.wordpress.com

I searched for “wordpress” on Lorelle on WordPress with Google and found 12,800 occasions of the use of the word. I’d say that I’m doing pretty good with that word, don’t you? 😉

If your list of keywords doesn’t match the reality of your post content, nor scores high on your list, fix the list. That’s part two of the blogging challenge.

UPDATE: As pointed out in the comments below by andypiper, if you use Google or another search engine to search for your keywords, and you have those keywords in your categories or tags, those will be found, skewing the end result of the challenge. This makes this challenge a little complicated as you may have these keywords in your categories and tags and still not write about them or fill your post content with them. You may have written about “movies” in one post, and added a category (using them like tags) and therefore Google will find the word “movies” on every post on your blog. This skews things. Try your search from your WordPress Administration panel Manage > Posts panel. That searches the database of posts not the generated posts which includes the sidebar. You will have to manually count the results as WordPress doesn’t return a count of how many posts were found with that word or phrase within them. If you use tags on a per-post basis manually, as I do with this blog, it will find all of those, so I recommend that you really look manually to see if you are tagging your posts with keywords used within your posts or just tag words you “think” the post relates to. Which was to be another challenge in the future. 😉 I’m looking for a better solution, but in the interim, try the various keyword analyzing tools found in the articles listed in The Keywords Inside and/or WordPress Development – Listing the Keywords Inside Your Blog. Another technique is to view a variety of random posts on your blog and copy all the text (leaving out the categories and tags) and paste it into Word Counter, a free online keyword testing service that checks the keywords in your writing. It makes the challenge a little more time consuming, but this is a good challenge to for your blog and blog writing, no matter how frustrating the testing process may be. Be aware that unless Word Counter has been updated, the top keywords may include “the, like, have, those, these” and other similar much used words. It doesn’t separate nouns from the rest of the words. Still, it might help. If someone else has a better idea for this, do let us know.

Part Two – Clean Up Your List of Top 10 Keywords for Your Blog and Post Them

Part two of the process is to clean up the list so it realistically lists the top ten keywords found on your blog. These are the words you use repeatedly throughout your blog posts, therefore they help to describe what you write about.

Keywords are words used to search for content in a search engine. If someone is searching for “wordpress themes” or “wordpress help” the odds are that this blog should be high in the search results page ranking, if I use enough of those keywords in my post content. That’s the key to keywords. You want to be found, you got to use the words people look for when they search.

When you have your top ten list of keywords, post it here. Be sure and put the link to your blog in the URL/domain name in the comment form so we can check out your blog and test your keywords for ourselves. 😉 And if you learned something about how keywords work and how you use them on your blog, tell us what you learned.

Related Articles

• What Are Keywords?
• Website Development – Keywords Help You Write Your Blog
• Website Development – Listing The Keywords Inside
• A New Way of Searching – Keyword Map
• Abuse: Keyword Spamming versus Tag Spamming
• Blog Writing: I lk yr blg

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