The question I asked on Marc’s Q & A Webinar last week was “Should I have keywords in my blog post titles? ”
After going through Module 2 videos of the coaching course about setting up a blog I realized that he had not said anything about keyword research or using keywords in blog posts or post titles.
Establish an online presence
All the things I have ever read about blogging say that you should spend some time researching keywords in your niche before setting up a blog and then work them into your blog titles and posts.
Marc said that he’s never bothered much with keyword research for the kind of blogs that we are building on the coaching course. We are not blogging about a particular niche like gardening or keeping hens. We are trying to build our brands and establish an online presence with our blogs.
And, the niche we are in – making money online, make money from home etc- is very competitive. It would be very hard to get ranked on the first page of Google for these terms.
Come to think of it I started this blog when I was doing Alex Jeffrey’s course and I didn’t bother much about keywords for blog titles then. But I did do some keyword research and use the keywords in the settings for my SEO plugin.
When I visited other student’s blogs I noticed that the ones that got the traffic didn’t write with search engines on mind at all. They attracted their audience because of the stories they wrote.
But that was over a year ago when we posted our latest blog posts in Alex’s forum. This was all part of the blog hopping or oil rig hopping as Alex called it. I don’t know if they are still getting the same sort of traffic. I must see if I can find any of them.
Two different views on keywords
I have heard some successful bloggers say they always write for readers and never for search engines. Yet others say they craft their titles very carefully around keywords.
So I thought I would do a bit of research into it.
One blogger, David Risley said this:
“I have managed to do pretty well as a blogger. I make my living at it, in fact. But, it has been pretty rare that I actually had search going through my mind when I wrote a post. I have all but ignored SEO and it doesn’t seem to have had a huge negative impact for me”.
Darren Rowse of ProBlogger says:
“Keywords in titles are good because firstly they grab the attention of readers who are scanning content. Secondly, keywords are important for the long tail life of your blog post as they tell search engines what your blog post is about and will help it to rank highly for those words.”
There, two completely different views. Well I am going to write for YOU for the moment but will use my keywords that I started this blog with when I can and see what results I get. I will be doing a lot of work promoting my blog in other ways but more of that later.
Do you write for people or search engines? Please share your thoughts below in the comment box.