Newbie totally confused about picking keywords for travel blog
Hello, My blog site is about off-the-beaten-track destinations in Iran. I am redoing my entire site for SEO for the first time. Yoast plugin wants me to pick a "focus keyphrase" for each post.
I want to attract people who are interested in travel to Iran.
So my obvious keyphrases are "travel to Iran" or "tour of Iran" or "trip to Iran" or "touring Iran" or similar phrases.
But picking these SAME keyphrases over and over for each page, does that make sense?
Yoast wants me to stuff the keyphrase in my title so all my titles are starting to look the same, starting or ending with "travel to Iran" or something similar.
But NOT picking these same keyphrases doesn't feel right either. The site is about travel to Iran. Some pages are not easy to keyword in just a couple of words. Article on "How to pick a tour of Iran that fits your personality?" --- what in the world would be the keyphrase for such an article? (Remember, I have to fit it the keyphrase in my title, meta description and first graph of the article.)
It is not required to please any SEO tool like Yoast to rank in search engines. Keywords depict the topic covered on a page. For example, in the mentioned article "How to pick a tour of Iran that fits your personality?", the keyword can be - pick Iran tour or something like this. SEO tools are to get an idea and might not need to score 100% to rank number 1 in search engines.
"But picking these SAME keyphrases over and over for each page, does that make sense?"
No, is the simple answer.
For your articles you use long term keywords. Your page " "How to pick a tour of Iran that fits your personality?" is a perfect example. Optimize it for example for the long tail: how to pick a tour in Iran? In this article you put 2 or 3 links, some to other relevant pages and 1 to your homepage with your main keyword travel to Iran.
Writing other pages use different phrases to link to your homepage, not only travel to Iran, it's not natural for search engines.
Don't write for SEO tools, but for your audience. Find out where they look for and give them the best information. If you do like this, you'll also find out that other webmasters will link to your articles.