How to Use Keywords In An Article

You enter words or groupings of terms into a search engine to find relevant content.

The articles with your search term (keywords) in the title are at the top of the results when you search for an article. If you’re writing articles, you need to know a bit about SEO so people can find your article. By adding keywords to a particular article, you can make it appear first in the search results. 

We’ll show you how to use keywords in an article and all the best practices so you don’t get penalized by Google!

But first, let’s clarify something here. We are not promoting keyword stuffing, keyword density, or adding a bunch of keywords because some software told you to include them.

No, this is about writing content for people first, then including them to help summarize what this content is about. The main focus here is to ensure we have included a concise and complete conclusion of what this article is about and intended for.

The audience will search for a specific question or a query. With that, the best user experience is providing the content they were searching for. If, for example, you did not provide the answer and want to include keywords to help rank better.

Well. The new Google helpful content update is going to destroy your site pretty much.

How to use keywords in an article

With that in mind, write your article based on what users are searching for, and to help rank your article and to help users know they came to the right place, you would follow these strategies and put your keywords in the right place.

1. Put keywords in the article title

Including keywords in the title (not the title tag mentioned later) is the first step in adding keywords to an article. Because it describes the content, the article’s title is significant for visitors and search engine crawlers.

Usually, the title is encoded in HTML as the H1 tag, which stands for the main heading. Regarding indexing and ranking an article in the SERPs, search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing strongly emphasize this website section. 

Following these straightforward guidelines will help you use keywords in the article title for SEO:

• Place the title’s main keyword at the start
• Where they naturally fit, add the supplementary keywords.
• To prevent over-optimization, avoid repeating words in the primary and secondary keywords.

2. Use keywords in the introduction paragraph

You should place your keywords in an article after the body in the introduction paragraph. Make it as SEO-friendly as possible, primarily inside the first 100 words.

Many SEO industry professionals argue that search engine algorithms like Google’s give the first few phrases of a post more weight. The introduction usually explains the main idea and concepts used throughout the page. 

The opening 100 words of an article might be crucial for both the reader and search engine crawlers who are gathering the SEO keywords you want your content to rank for in the SERPs. The following advice will help your opening paragraph rank as highly as possible:

• Include your main keyword in the first sentence or two.
• After that, add at least one more secondary keyword, but keep it within the first 100 words. 
• Without making the content appear forced, include as many more secondary keywords as possible. If you must use these keywords after the recommended first 100 words, try to incorporate them naturally into the first 200 words of the introduction.

3. Insert keywords naturally throughout the article

It’s simple to forget that the reader truly comes first in a digital world that appears to be dominated by SEO. Never let poor keyword placement jeopardize your reader’s capacity to be interested, informed, and enlightened by your material. But trust me, it occurs frequently. Here is a tip to help you naturally include keywords in your writing. 

Use stop words in awkward keyword phrases

Utilizing “Stop Words” in your keyword writing is one approach to assist you in writing keywords more organically. These words can be added to make keyword phrases read more organically while maintaining their ranking worth.

For example, there is virtually no way you can enter the keyword “plumbing Salt Lake City” into your text precisely as-is without it looking like a typo or a blatant keyword insertion.

Utilizing a stop word in that phrase is a superior method of including keywords for SEO. If the stop word “in” were added, the sentence would now read “plumbing in Salt Lake City,” which is considerably easier to incorporate into informal writing. A list of frequently used stop words is simple to obtain and can be used when adding keywords to your website. 

4. Use keywords in headings.

Articles use headings to arrange information presentation and logically guide readers around the page. The heading tags on a web page vary from H1 to H6, with H1 being the most significant heading and the others being H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6.

Any content management system (CMS), such as WordPress, has a text editor that makes it simple to mark the key content parts with H2 tags.

The H3 tags would be placed around H2 headings’ sub-sections until they reached the H6 tags.

The best recommendation based on SEO testing for employing keywords in the heading tags of an article is to concentrate on the H2 and H3 tags for ranking reasons.

The HTML header elements are a ranking factor for Google’s search engine since they identify the most crucial subjects in the content and are utilized to define the thematic hierarchy of the article content. 

You should also “Use page headings that convey the content of the page,” according to Google’s guidance.

As a result, improving your article’s results for several keywords to the headings. Additionally, the more information you have, the more headings you may use to divide up the page for SEO naturally.

5. Put keywords in the summary or conclusion

The summary summarizes the key elements, whereas the introduction establishes the fundamental framework and expectations for the reader reading the piece. 

Therefore, it may be argued that the article summary also benefits SEO rankings. Therefore, include your keywords in the content summary to complete the keyword placement. 

You can follow these tips which can help you do that:

• Within the final 100 words of the page, place your main keyword. 
• The final 100 words of the post should contain as many secondary keywords as possible while still appearing genuine.
• Ensure the last 200 words of the article’s content contain all secondary keywords if you can’t fit them all in the final few phrases. 

6. Add keywords in the image ALT text

When producing an article and trying to make it SEO-friendly, you can incorporate your keywords in places other than the written text.

In reality, you can raise the content’s total ranking worth by integrating images in the article and optimizing them for particular terms. 

Additionally, when you accomplish this correctly, your photographs may appear in Google Image Search, a different technique to drive visitors to your website from the main Google Search Engine.

All you need to do to add keywords to an image is enter them in the ALT text area. By clicking on the image to reveal the hidden property values and then looking for the ALT text field, this is simple to achieve on my CMS platforms like WordPress (or box).

You can add your keywords to the ALT text area to increase the subject relevance of the material. Just describe the image and use your intended search phrases adequately.

Screen readers use the ALT text information to assist those with disabilities in understanding the context of the image. Therefore, you shouldn’t just jam your keywords into this HTML box without giving the user the proper context. 

Be action-oriented when writing an ALT text image.

Here’s a little minion almost falling asleep.

If you’re trying to rank for a specific keyword like “boring content,” you can use something like

“Minion is falling asleep after reading the first paragraph of your article.”

Adding just the keyword isn’t going to cut it anymore. The more descriptive and action orient it is, the better it will be for you.

7. Put keywords in the meta title tag

To optimize your keyword placement properly, follow these next three steps if you can also alter the meta tag information for the published post. 

(If you use WordPress for your website, you can modify the meta titles to increase the likelihood that they will rank well in searches by using an SEO plugin like All in One SEO, Yoast, or Rank Math.) The most crucial area in the HTML code of an article to include your keyword phrases is the meta title tag, often known as the title tag, which is different than a H1 heading. 

The first piece of advice is always to use your most critical keywords here. Additional pointers for improving the usability and SEO of your meta descriptions include:

• The meta title should start with your main keyword. The search engines consider a term more relevant the closer it is to the beginning of the meta title.
• To avoid over-optimization, include as many secondary keywords as possible without repeating any of them. If possible, keep the article’s meta title to 60 characters or less, with 65 being the maximum. 

8. Use keywords in the meta description

Because it isn’t a direct ranking factor for Google, the meta description is one of the simplest ways to add keywords for SEO yet is sometimes disregarded. 

The meta description is still very important for the user because it serves as a concise summary of the article’s content and explains its topic. And a lot of people evaluate a URL’s value based on its meta description.

Therefore, using your keywords in this area can aid Google in better filtering your URLs in the SERPs and increase search engine clicks. 

The following advice will make adding keywords to the meta description simple:

• In the meta description, start with the primary keyword. 
• Include a minimum of two additional keywords in this HTML area. 
• Limit the total number of characters to 160 or less. If not, Google can omit a piece of it from the SERPs.

9. Put keywords in anchor text links

It suggests that the target page is extremely related to the issue when a keyword is utilized as the anchor text link on another web page that links to the target page you recently published and want to rank for. 

The term “internal linking” for SEO describes this search engine optimization technique. 

And a good rule of thumb is to include at least 3-6 internal links with well-chosen keyword anchor text to each new post you publish on your website. 

The following are two quick tips for including keywords in the anchor text of your internal links:

• Using the same link anchor text more than 50% of the time is never a good idea. You should change your anchor text to avoid raising a red alert to Google that you are abusing the system. 
• Try to incorporate your primary and secondary keywords into each internal anchor text link at least once. This implies that if you’re targeting a total of three keywords in one article, you’ll have three separate web pages referring to the target page internally, each using a different set of exact match keyword phrases. 

10. Add keywords in the article URL

Your keywords should also be used in the article’s URL. The greatest URLs provide the page’s content to visitors and search engines. The user and search engines will be given a good signal that the page may be a suitable match for the search query if the text in the URL closely resembles the title of the article displayed in the SERPs.

To get the most SEO ranking power out of the web page, you should always optimize the URL for every item you post. 

How many keywords should you use on a page?

The SEO community frequently debates and discusses this excellent subject. It all depends on your content’s length and the kinds of keywords you have.

The number of keywords to concentrate on a page relies heavily on the keywords you want to employ, how closely related they are, and whether they advance the content’s main point. It shouldn’t be too difficult to generate a list of 5-10 keywords with the proper keyword research.

According to the general guideline, you should aim to insert your main keyword once per 100-150 words. Therefore, it would be fine to include the major keyword 7-10 times in a 1000-word piece. Remember to balance these keyword occurrences throughout the article as well evenly. 

This article has 5 of the primary keyword mentioned throughout the article:

For SEO, there are three basic categories of keywords:

1. Primary keyword
2. Secondary keywords
3. Additional keywords

Your major keyword should be the article’s primary topic, which should be reflected in both the title and the body copy.

Only one core keyword should be utilized to move the meat of the material forward because it’s difficult to construct a solid piece of content addressing two distinct topics.

Secondary keywords, merely subtle modifications, complement the primary keyword. 3-5 primary talking points make up most main topics, so it makes it reasonable to use a few of those secondary keywords. 

Conclusion

You now know how to add keywords to an article. Build a content strategy based on your research and relevant keyword usage to optimize your website. You should be well on your way to an optimized website that will result in higher SERP ranks if you keep these recommendations in mind. Hopefully, this post gave you some advice on how to include keywords in articles for SEO.