Science Blog: Increase Blog Traffic With Keywords

Science writing for a science blog greatly differs from science writing for a journal or magazine. This might be tough to take down, but in some ways blogs requires more stringent adherence to sentence structure and word placement than a peer-reviewed paper. However, editors you've never met won't set these limitations, but your own ambitions to increase blog traffic will. I'm referring to
"keywords" , and their unequivocal importance for search engine ranking.

Keyword Search
There's a process for finding quality & relevant words. This is one of many outlines:

1. Brain Storming words/phrases
2. Use thesaurus to expand semantically relevant phrases and modifiers
3. Search: tools
4. Determine relevance
5. Build on words
6. Search again
7. Evaluate relevance
8. Use it

Keyword Selection
Here's a post from an internet marketing company in Central NY, which suggest how to select keywords with Google's keyword tool. Although simple, this part of the process is crucial, like a great experiment design is crucial.

Emphasis
So, now that you have these keywords/phrases, how are they used? Where do you put them? And, How many should you use?

A few quick answers are:

• Use 3-4 of the words/phrases in your blog post (don't over use keywords or you will be categorized as spammers)
• Put them at the beginning and end of the post (this is where the search engines look for the relevant content)
• Also, include the most descriptive of these terms into your post's title. (this is your post's first impression to the reader, and must draw them in)
• Bold some of these words/phrases. (search engines note this as important content)

Following this "organic" method is a great start to getting your science blog or website ranked in the top 10 results in a search engine. There are certainly other factors to consider, and I'll review those in future posts.