How much do you worry about keywords when blogging?

I'm relatively new to blogging - only been doing it for a few months. The common advice is to make your posts keyword rich for high search engine ranking. But I don't normally worry too much about that. I do take it into consideration, and make an effort to include keywords if it makes sense, but I don't go crazy if I can't. My biggest concern is making my posts informative and easy to read.

Just curious as to what your thoughts are on this topic. How do you approach your writing? Do you try to make your posts as keyword rich as possible? Do you not worry about it at all? And how successful (i.e. increasing readership) have you been with your approach?

Also, do you have any recommendations on how to increase the use of keywords in blog posts?

None at all.

I know some people say it's the whole thing, but in the past three years of blogging I still get almost zero traffic from Google and tons from human beings sharing links (in every way: Twitter, FB, Reddit, blog posts, email, whatever).

You win when people like it and tell their friends.

It's too hard (IMHO) to compete on Google with everything else, especially when you're new to it.

Don't worry too much about the keywords in your posts. I agree with Jason that the best way to increase traffic to your blog is to write interesting content, good content will keep people coming back to your site. However, I believe it is also important to make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog, either by email, rss feed, etc... try to motivate people to comment by asking them to do it at the end of your posts, etc... and if you are interested in getting some traffic from search engines then you could use "good" keywords in the title of your posts, that should be sufficient.

I have a new blog, just started it a month ago and just like Jason mentioned above, most of the traffic comes from hacker news, twitter, StumbleUpon, etc... I don't worry about keywords, however, there have been a couple of posts where because of the title of the post, I rank 1 or 2 in Google from thousands of results... I just think that is interesting, since this is a new blog.

These are the some of the search where my blog ranks just below Google's own news site, I did nothing to accomplish this, just used descriptive blog post titles:

• texas education channel on itunes u
• 499.00 jet blue deals
• profit earn by dell (my site ranks higher than businessweek for this one... :))
• wpengine and secure ftp

Write good interesting content and you'll be fine, more importantly, be honest and do not try to make everyone happy.

Good luck!

I've been writing for a year and a half, about to hit 300 articles on my site. While I don't ignore keywords completely, I usually take them into account after the fact, or when writing titles. That is, I write what I want to write, but will then modify the title to be link bait, or toss in a keyword.

The end result, though, is that it doesn't seem to make much difference in most cases. I'm still being found by people asking the questions I answer on my site, regardless of whether or not I've optimized that article in particular. I'm not getting a lot of hits for random keywords, but more for the overall content.

In summary, I would suggest you basically ignore the issue of keywords, and focus on writing good copy in general, and writing about interesting topics to your target audience.

We don't. Our blog is very topic specific and trying to game Google would just alienate our readers and make for a less enjoyable experience for us. That being said the topic specificness of the blog means we tend to rank fairly well for almost anything in our core area of interest.