SEMPR: Picking Great Keywords
I’ve been working with several clients recently who are just now setting up their company blogs. One of the first things we do is to create categories, also known as keywords, for their blogs, which serve two functions:
- From a search engine marketing (SEM) perspective, categories and keywords should be phrases for which we want the blog to appear in search results.
- Properly constructed, long tail (define) keywords can help refine a topic so much that your relevance in search results is more accurate. For example, I was searching the other day for best practices in commenting on blog posts. I typed in “commenting best-practices” and found nothing but developer information on how to properly comment code. When I changed the search to “commenting etiquette,” the results I was served were much more relevant. Defining as closely as possible how you want to be found is critical to how you write your blog. And thinking like your clients and prospects is key to creating categories and keywords that will ensure your success.
- From a PR, or thought leadership perspective, what are the topics around which the blog will be built?
- Every blogger and every blog should have a mission, and every post should support the mission in some way. So as you’re considering what you want to be known for in the blogosphere, think about the words you’d want your readers to know you by. In my blog, I think I’m known for discussing marketing technology - a broad category. In that category, I write about topics such as blogging, RSS, social media, collaboration tools, SEMPR - the combination of search engine marketing and PR, etc. These topics are all topics for which I’d like to be known, and (therefore) found in search.
At the same time, most of my categories are very broad, with the exception of SEMPR (on which few search, I would imagine, since I made it up).
I should practice what I preach, and refine my categories further.
For example, instead of simply using “RSS,” as a broad category, I generally write about “enterprise RSS” which is a much tighter definition, and likely to generate a more relevant result for those who are interested in how business use RSS, vs. RSS itself.
There are tools to help pick great keywords, but the very best one is sitting right between your ears and behind your eyes…
How might you refine your keywords and categories to better serve your blog, your prospects and your clients?
