how do you word the query to paginate a fulltext search correctly?

I just started working on a search feature for a small site im creating for a friend, and im having a bit of trouble building the query to page the search results.

the query I've created works perfect minus pagination:

$sql = "SELECT *,
 
         MATCH(title, desc) AGAINST('$keyword') AS score
 
         FROM database
 
         WHERE MATCH(title, desc) AGAINST('$keyword') AND `cat` = '$cat'  ";
 

but then for paging, im use to doing something like:

$query = "SELECT COUNT(*) as num FROM $tableName";
 $total_pages = mysql_fetch_array(mysql_query($query));
 $total_pages = $total_pages[num];
 

so the part where im lost is how can I combine the two? I tried:

$sql = "SELECT COUNT(*),
 
         MATCH(title, desc) AGAINST('$keyword') AS score
 
         FROM database
 
         WHERE MATCH(title, desc) AGAINST('$keyword') AND `cat` = '$cat'  ";
 

im somewhat new to programming so this is probably a stupid question but any help would be greatly appreciated

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