If you want traffic to your website, you MUST include keywords that will attract the search engines to your site.
The keywords need to be relevant to the subject of your article, so a page on football, for instance, should have keywords related to football, not cooking or fishing, otherwise it may be considered spammy and not shown in the results. But how do you know the best keywords to include? You need objective data that tells you which keywords have good numbers of searches each month, the level of competition and the trend, that is, are the number of searches increasing, decreasing or are they seasonal (like Christmas and summer vacations)?
A new blog is unlikely to get traffic from the most popular keywords – the biggest and oldest web sites will corner that. But you might be able to get some traffic from less popular keywords, if you know what those are! Without a good tool, the keywords you include in your article will just be a shot in the dark. No matter what niche you’re in, whether it’s gluten free organic cooking or football celebrity escapades, nor which strategies you use for keyword research, you are going to need to use a keyword research tool. One free one is the Google Keyword Planner. There is plenty of information on line, both articles and videos, on how to use Google Keyword Planner to find low-competition, high-volume keywords and trends you need to include the best keywords for your articles.
Keyword Planner is mainly targeted at advertisers who use it for their advertising campaigns. But it can also be used by those looking for suitable keywords for their articles and blogs. Many keyword researchers rely on Google Keyword Planner data at some time, but the data is not always suitable and should be looked at with critical analysis and maybe even a touch of scepticism. Not all the top keywords are always shown in the keyword planner and those it recommends are not always the top keywords. This may, however, be useful if you are looking for lower volume keywords to start out with. But it could also mean you could miss out on keyword opportunities unless you dig deeper. This means that while Google Keyword Planner may form part of your keyword research toolkit you need something else too, to find those keywords that can push your blog or article up the search engine results.
I use a paid -for keyword search tool. This is not the cheapest tool and is not always available for purchase but it certainly provides me with plenty of great information and because it is not dependent on Google, it provides objective information on which you can base your decisions. It not only provides information on keywords, numbers of searches, competition and trends, it also tells you which websites on Page 1 of Google could be replaced by YOUR site, with a bit of work. It provides so much more too. It analyses your site and tells what SEO tips will help improve your rankings. It can tell you how your website ranks already and how to improve and what backlinks you have. There are a number of keyword tools available at varying prices.