Keyword every blog post?

[mrcsleonard]

Hi

Should I be looking to keyword every blog post I write?

Obviously the point in a blog for most of us is to draw in traffic so should I keyword research every blog post and use that as keyword?

What if there is no keyword stats for the blog im writing? I guess I just use a keyword I make up anyway and hope people type it?

Thanks

Chris

[WilliamKammer]

It never hurts to do a little keyword research and do some optimization for blog posts, just don't go overboard and force keywords into a blog post for ranking's sake. As long as it's natural in the writing or headlines, it's almost always good to target larger groups of the traffic you want, as opposed to smaller or non-existent groups.

[iPullRank]

Hey Chris,

I agree with William. You should always take a peek at the relevant keyword research tools to see what vocabulary people are using to discuss your topic, but don't worry too much about having a post title that mirrors those phrases exactly. Even if the phrase is long tail, Google's keyword tool is just an estimation so there may be more people searching for a given term than you think. Check out UberSuggest and also look at keyword trends in Social Media using Bottlenose's Sonar tool. Those may give you more of an indication of what keywords people are using.

Definitely don't go haywire on shoehorning keywords into titles and headings, but do be sure what keywords that a given post owns so that you can go back through your site and link to those new posts from old posts with the relevant keywords.

-Mike