The use of keywords is a central area of SEO, although far from the only factor in getting content ranked high. Knowing the right keywords to use is, therefore, a crucial element if you want your website content to be found easily by those searching on Google or other search engines.

Every search begins with a keyword, which by definition means that a crucial element of being found is to use keywords in your text that match up to the terms people are looking for. Depending what it is your firm does and offers, the most popular term might remain persistently the same or change quite frequently. There may be many relevant terms, or just a few.

Either way, it is important to know what to include. This is not just true when you are setting out with a new website and seeking to populate it with its first pieces of content; indeed, in this situation even the most effective SEO strategy is likely to take around six months to get you to page one of the rankings because you need to build up authority over this time.

While initial research can identify the best keywords to use, it is also important to be aware that these can change over time. Some terms will become less popular and new ones will emerge. That means however long you have been producing content, you will need to keep on researching to ensure your keywords are the most useful.

The best way to do this is to use keyword searching tools. There are several good options available, including Hubspot, SerpStat and SEMRush. However, this can take some time and if you are outsourcing this task, you will need help from someone with real SEO expertise to know how to search for the right keywords and integrate them in your text.

Tools like these will help track which keywords appear most in searches and can also show how often the keywords you have been using up until now are used. It can also reveal the search terms that appear in the most popular content and how effective a keyword you plan to use might be.

Discovering the most popular keywords is an important step, but to make the most of this new knowledge you will need to apply it in particular ways.

A couple of approaches to avoid are using the same keyword repeatedly and to avoid adding too many keywords into one item of content. These approaches, known as spam and keyword stuffing, will be seen a deliberate attempt to game the system and search engines will penalise them.

In addition, forcing too many keywords into the text can also diminish the readability of the content, which will also be penalised by search engine algorithms.

The other step you can take is to amend older content to boost its SEO. By going back to tweak it, you can swap out keywords that are no longer popular searches and replace them with new, more popular ones.

By finding the most popular keywords, using them sparingly but well and updating your content regularly, you can ensure that this central element of your SEO is in the best possible shape to help you get the most visits to your site.

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