When you write for the web, where do you put your keywords?
How often should you use your keywords?
These keyword placement questions crop up a lot when writing for SEO.
Yesterday I highlighted my two favourite tools for SEO copywriting and on-page optimisation. Today, I’ll highlight two tools I use that answer those burning questions and help you perfect your keyword placement in your blog posts, articles and webpages.
Contents
Two (More) Great SEO Copywriting Tools
This first SEO copywriting tool is for more advanced writers and bloggers…
Inbound Writer
Rev up your SEO Copywriting score with Inbound Writer
This is a web based app that analyses real time search and social words to help target your writing. Just like Scribe, it analyses what you have already written and tells you what it think you are writing about. You can also define the keywords you think you are writing about too…
Why is this tool for more advanced web writers?
Inbound Writer works on keyword theming – you write around a minimum of three related keywords at a time. It analyses your article and suggests a whole range of words and phrases based on popular terms and phrases people are using now in search and social. Keywords are starred depending on your settings.
It’s not for the faint hearted! You can find yourself lost in time tweaking and editing, trying to make that pointer whizz around to 100% – that’s no bad thing!
For my post on web content writing, I struggled to score for secondary and tertiary words. It’s “scoring” well in Yoast, Scribe and Click Bump because they look at single focus keywords. My SEO score just starting to rev up in Inbound Writer.
I do use related words and phrases, but I naturally write at the lower end for “keyword counting”. For my article, IW requires three different terms to be mentioned at least five times each to be seen as a focus terms.
For short articles, I find three phrases used at least five times each is too much. As someone who prefers to read, I find those numbers can be quite clunky. It’s a personal preference though.
Perfect your SEO Copywriting with Inbound Writer
Inbound Writer really comes into its own for longer pages because it encourages keyword theming and related words, which are really important online. Add to that its additional options to optimise your writing for social popularity or search competition, write for Google Adsense or not and reading ability of your audience – it’s got a place in my nifty tools toolbox!
Unlike Yoast and Scribe it only advises on the writing you read on the page and not the meta tags the search engines see. It doesn’t remind you about images or links out. It’s purely an SEO copywriting tool.
Inbound Writer is free to use up to eight times per month and an upgrade is available. It’s a great browser based tool to practice your SEO copywriting and for optimising longer pages and posts.
There is a WordPress plugin available. It didn’t work for me, probably because of an incompatibility with other plugins I use.
Check out Inbound Writer here.
Last but not least, perfect your keyword placement skills with…
ClickBump SEO WordPress Plugin
There are lots of WordPress plugins that do a similar job. If you have a self-hosted WordPress site, no doubt you have had your spam comments blasted with recommendations for SEOPressor and others too.
Back to ClickBump SEO…
This WordPress SEO plugin provides a checklist to ensure you have keyword elements covered. I like it because it sits in the sidebar and is easily seen as you write. It also shows a score on the page/post overview so you know which posts you need to go back and tweak.
The related keywords (Get LSI) button works and pulls in words and phrases related to the focus keyword you define. LSI is latent semantic indexing. We can argue if that is the correct term to use later! Needless to say, it’s a term used in internet marketing to mean related keywords, even if technically it is not the correct definition…
Easily check your keyword placement with ClickBump SEO
Another bonus is you can “nofollow” links easily on page from the plugin.
It goes above and beyond what Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin does for keyword placement and is visually more appealing. It helps with the content structure of your posts and pages, but doesn’t cover the meta description and title tag.
I bought this WordPress plugin a while back as an offer. It’s now available as part of the ClickBump bundle which contains WordPress themes and the jumpstart page templates. The themes and plugin can be used on any site you own. It’s a one off payment of $97 (about £60).
SEO Copywriting Isn’t The Full Story!
All four SEO Copywriting tools I’ve mentioned are just that. They’re tools to help you follow guidelines. They’re not rules, nothing is set in stone. Worrying about keyword density and keyword counting is not something that should keep you awake at night – there are no ideal numbers.
Remember too, on-page optimisation is just a part of what helps your web pages to rank in the search engines. No amount of tools or plugins will change that. Links pointing back to your pages are still more important.
Image from cheezburger.com
Just as a side note, Inbound Writer gives this article a score of 96. ClickBump tells me I am sweet at 70 and Scribe marks me at 94%. These SEO Copywriting tools all score your writing slightly differently.
To quote Catherine Tate, “Am I bovvered?” No, I know there’s enough words on the page that GoogleBot will know what I am talking about…
Which tools do you use to help you write for the web and improve your SEO copywriting?
SEO Copywriting - Where Do I Put My Keywords? by Jan Kearney
Two tools that I wasn’t aware of, Jan.
Thanks very much for sharing and the in-depth explanation of how they both work.
It seems to me that you can spend hours trying to get everything right but in the end I think readability is probably the most important.
Hi Valerie, oh yes, HOURS. But then you end up with something that doesn’t sound like you.
They’re tools though not miracle workers!
Hi Jan,
Trying to keep up with search engine changes, the perfect keyword placement, density, etc., can drive you crazy.
I love the tools you’ve mentioned and no doubt they’ll offer some useful insight, but I’ve also learned that keeping it simple, sticking to basic SEO practices, writing quality, useful content and letting social marketing and email pave a path, I’ve had better results
Hi Liz, You are right of course. These things can drive you crazy, which is why I don’t beat the write for humans out of my clients. Write for humans and a nod at the Big G. Thanks for popping in, I appreciate your comment 🙂
Hi there,
Thank you for the great information shared. It’s always challenging/rewarding to find that balance between making content search-worthy for the search engines and engaging for the consumers. Obviously, a website needs both qualities to succeed.
These look like great tools on the front-end of SEO and I look forward to checking them out. Thanks again!
-Joshua