Give your web content a laser focus for SEO
One of the first things, you’ll do as a content writer is decide what topic to write about. This topic can be transformed into a focus keyword for your web content by following a few guidelines.

In my article on Choosing Web Content Keywords, I discuss how to create a list of keyword phrases for your content. When choosing a focus keyword, you’ll pick one phrase from a list of topic-related keyword phrases as follows:

• Test out each phrase in your writing. The phrase should seem natural (not forced into the text) and flow with what you are writing.
• Keep in mind that you will use this phrase in headings, sentences, and meta tags for search engines.
• Choose one focus keyword phrase for your content.
• Note that the focus keyword phrase is not the same as the meta keyword HTML tag.

Why choose only one focus keyword page per web page or blog post?

Think about how you search the web. Usually you’ll have a very specific focus in your search phrase. Well, the search engines are focused, too.

They use the words on your web page and in your meta tags to figure out what your web page is about. Say you are writing about back pain causes, back pain exercises, and back pain treatment all on one page. Well, Google and the other search engines will pick one of these phrases as the main keyword focus for your page. If you want Google to pick back pain exercises out of the three phrases, then you need to give strong hints to search engines that that is the topic of your page by making it your focus keyword.

You can give these hints to search engines by placing your focus keyword phrase in specfic places in your web content such as:

• The title tag
• Heading tags (H1, H2, etc.)
• Page content
• Meta description
• Optional meta keywords

This strategic keyword placement increases the likelihood that the search engine will choose that phrase as the main topic of your page.

Here are some tips for using the focus keyword in your writing:

• Include your focus keyword phrase in the first sentence of your content.
• If it makes sense include the focus keyword phrase in a subheading.
• Don’t use the exact focus keyword phrase too many times. Two to three occurrences is all you need.
• Where it makes sense, use variations of the focus keyword and even some other long tail keyword phrases you identified in your keyword research.
• And most of all remember that you are writing for people, not for search engines.