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If you’re striving to get blog visitors from the search engines, you’ll need to do some basic on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  This involves using your targeted keywords in the optimal places on your webpages, such as Title Tags, H1, H2, alt tags, post titles, anchor text, and more. While Wordpress is pretty SEO friendly as-is, everything starts with keyword research.

Keyword research involves two very important components:

• Choosing keywords that people are actually searching for. The words that you think people might use to search for your blog are often different than the words people actually use. It’s important to actually determine which words people are using to find websites related to your blog topic.  It’s also important that the keywords you choose have a decent search volume so that they warrant you targeting them. Low search volume = low website traffic.
• Choosing keywords that do not have too many competing websites. The number of websites competing for a given keyword and the authority of those sites will determine how difficult it is to rank highly for the chosen keyword.

Brainstorming Keywords

Keeping the two important goals above in mind, you can do much (if not all) of your keyword research by using a variety of free tools available online.  I personally prefer to focus on ranking highly on Google, since it is currently king of the search engines.  Here are my top 3 favorite free keyword search tools:

1. Google’s Free Keyword Tool
2. WordTrackers Free Keyword Tool
3. Aaron Wall’s SEO Book Keyword Tool

The best place to start is by brainstorming keywords that are associated with your blog topic.  For example, if you’re blog is about losing weight, you might start with words like weight loss, fitness, dieting, etc. (For the record, the weight loss niche is extremely competitive, so I don’t recommend you choose that topic unless it’s a very specific sub-niche.)  Once you’ve got a list of keyword ideas, use the free keyword tools listed above to find out if those words are actually being searched for and then build a list of keyword variations that have around 1,000-5,000 searches per month. The more searches per month the better, but remember – you’ve got to balance the number of searches on the chosen keyword with how competitive that word is as well.

Preliminary Assessment of the Competition

A quick and dirty way to determine how much competition a keyword has is simply by searching for the chosen word in Google. I also search for the keyword by putting in “quotes” to see how many websites are specifically targeting that keyword.  As a general rule, it’s usually easier to rank for keywords that have less than a million competitors. 500,000 competitors or less is usually great and less than 100,000 competitors is often fantastic.  Keywords with over a million competitors can still be targeted, but it may just take longer to rank on the first page of Google.

Digging Deeper into Competitor Websites

Once you’ve done some prelimiary assesment of the competition, you will want to dig deeper into the websites that appear on the first page of Google for that keyword when using a broad match search (i.e. no quotes). It’s important to note that any first page ranking website that includes internal webpage sitelinks under it’s listing has been deemed an authority site by Google and is going to be a very strong competitor. It does not mean you should dismiss that keyword, but you will want to carefully evaluate the other first page listings to see if it’s worth the challenge. Here are some other factors to look at when evaluating first page listings and determining the average authority of those sites.

• Use of the keyword in the title. SEO savvy webmasters know the importance of using the chosen keyword in the title tag. If you find the keyword you are researching in the title of the listing (which is pulled from the sites title tag) that website is specifically targeting that particiular keyword.  If many of the websites showing up on the first page for that keyword search do not have the keyword in the title then you may have a easier time ranking for that keyword.
• Google PageRank. Google assignes a number between 0-10 to each webpage based upon what Google perceives as the value of that webpage. The higher your Google PR, the better.  While this ranking is somewhat outdated and growing in it’s inaccuracy, it’s still a decent gauge of the competition as Google sees them.  A website with PR 5 and above are typcially more challenging to outrank.
• Inbound links. Incoming links are at the core of off-page SEO, which I’m not going to delve into here. It’s important to check the number of inbound links for the website’s listing.  You can check the number of links a site has by doing a link check using Yahoo.com. You simply type “link:(insert the exact webpage URL listed here)”. For example, if you wanted to determine the number of links for the post you are reading right now, you would type this- link:http://www.myblogconsult.com/wordpress-seo/keyword-research-on-page-seo.

When determing what keywords you should use for your blog, you will want to use the recommendations above until you have 4-6 well-searched, low-medium competitive keywords. Determine which of those 4-6 words is the best one and then make it your primary keyword.  Your primary keyword should be used in your title tags, h1 tags, and even your domain name , if desired.  Use the other keywords in your other header tags (h2, h3, etc.) and alt tags. You will also want to use your keywords naturally within your content, bolding and italicizing them here and there. And finally, when other websites link to you, do what you can to have those websites use your chosen keywords as the anchor text for your link.