Simple Keyword optimization technique for homepage and category pages of a WordPress blog

In this post, I am gonna talk about a simple keyword optimization technique for WordPress blogs. This piece of blog advice that I am giving away is easy to implement and is an onsite blog optimization technique. Let’s start off with the basics. If you have a blog and you want people to get to your blog from search engines and you want to make some cash online from your traffic, you gotta devise a strategy to make it happen. Although, offsite optimization plays a bigger role while trying to rank your blog better in search engines like Google, a combination of onsite and offsite optimization techniques will help you rank even better.

In almost all blogs, the blog’s homepage is targeted for a set of keywords, different category pages are targeted for different sets of keywords and different posts are targeted for different sets of keywords. While optimizing a blog post for a set of keywords might be easy, optimizing the homepage and category pages of a blog for keywords is somewhat challenging.

Let’s start. First of all, you need to be clear about what keywords you are targeting. That means you gotta select sets of keywords for your homepage and category pages. If you want to reap financial benefits from your blog, keyword selection is a very important part and generally, you would need to do a lot of keyword research before you are able to find the right keywords you should be going after. I am not going to go into details of how to do keyword research in this post. I use Google’s Adwords keyword research tool and I think it’s a great FREE tool. You might also want to use the same if you are yet to sort out the keywords you would be targeting.

Second, to implement this keyword optimization technique, you would need to structure your blog for it. Chances are, you already have this kind of structure for your blog. You blog’s homepage should show the descriptions of the posts and your category pages should show the excerpts.

Although the technique I am explaining here can be applied to all blogging platforms that have provisions for excerpts and descriptions, let’s take WordPress for an example because it’s the platform that I use and it’s the platform that most of my readers use. If you are using WordPress, excerpts of posts are 55 words long by default unless truncated beforehand with a more tag or a custom excerpt is written. Descriptions of posts go till the more tags. This kind of structure forms the base for this keyword optimization technique. You now need to perform the following steps to effectively optimize your blog for keywords.

1. You need to inject the keywords selected earlier for the category page of the category that the post belongs to in the first 55 words of the post so that it will show up in the excerpts shown in the category page.
2. You need to inject the keywords selected earlier for the blog’s homepage after the first 55 words in the post but before the more tag.
3. While performing steps 1 and 2, you also need to take in mind that your individual blog posts also need to be targeted for certain keywords. So you would also want to inject keywords related to your post in those first 55 words or before the more tags. You would also want to inject relevant keywords along the way till the end of the post. Make sure you don’t overdo this and keep your keywords percentage in a blog post to below 5%. Putting keywords at the start and end of a post is a great idea.
4. You may want to skip steps 1 and/or 2 while writing some posts to make sure you don’t over stuff your keywords in your homepage and the category pages.

If you look closely, what we have done is, we have optimized the descriptions of posts showing up in the homepage to have the keywords we selected for the homepage. Similarly, the excerpts in the category pages are optimized to have the keywords that we selected for category pages ( and not the keywords that we selected for the homepage ). Although the descriptions in the homepage will also show the keywords selected for the category pages, this should not cause any problems because different posts in the homepage would generally belong to different categories and the keyword density would not be high enough to make the homepage and category pages fight against each other for the rankings.

If you cannot get my point even after you re-read, drop a comment and I will be happy to explain.

Happy Blogging !