How much emphasis on Keywords?

[TR123]

I would be interested in hearing from experienced bloggers how much emphasis you put on Keywords in your blog? So you go for the big searched for results or try picking the lesser chosen ones/less competition?

Thanks

[samhdrew]

They say that keywords are very important because with the right keywords, you could get a high page rank. That's why choosing keywords is very crucial.

[Ramkarthik]

Im no master in SEO or anything. But I can tell you what I do about keywords. Getting to the top page of a Heavily searched keyword is very tough. You can target long tail keywords and write posts with some good number of long tail keywords. I prefer using wordtracker tool to get the search words. It is free and good. Also you have to note that the results displayed in the search of wordtracker are the no. of searches per day. I would target a long tail keword with 20 searches a day. If I select top for 10 such keywords, then 200 searches a day which means 6000 searches a month. You will surely get 1/3 of the number of searches to your blog. So that means 2000 visitors which is surely not bad. This is what I do. If Im wrong anywhere please do correct me.

[roundouts]

wordtraker is free? I though it was a free trial or something. I'll check it out, thanks.

[Ramkarthik]

Wordtracker is actually a trial version. But they now have a free version which you can get here (http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/).

[roundouts]

cool! thanks for the link:)

[Mani Karthik]

When selecting Keywords, i normally suggest them in combination to my clients.
Clearly picking up a keyword like "Free XXXXX" is suicidal. But it makes sense to pick something like "Wordpress tweaks" rather than "Wordpress" . This is done by calculating your competition strength. how many competitors for the same keyword - their health - space left for you etc.

[blogginginc]

First here is a very complete keyword tool
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/

Second, this is what I do with each of my posts.
I use all in one seo plugin wordpress (allows to set a different title tag, keywords and description for each post).
I use a max of two long tail keywords (3+) in the title, in the description within the text (depends on the post lenght, but I add it around three times or more. I also use the keywords that I am trying to rank in the search engines, meaning for the whole blog, so I use them in every post I publish, then I get backlinks with that same anchor text. There are a thousand more tricks, this is just a basic tip. Hope it helps.

[Coldie]

You can try this free keyword research tool (http://www.goodkeywords.com/).

[redtomato]

goodkeywords is a good tool. just like blogginginc, i suggest you spend some time reading the seo articles in seobook.com. :)