What Are Keywords?
The Building Blocks of SEO: The Importance of Keywords for Your Website
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of using different techniques to increase the number of people who visit a particular website. This is accomplished by making the site more accessible via the search engines.
The use of keywords is the most reliable way of using the search engines to gain the attention of those browsing the internet for information.
What Are Keywords?
People use search engines like Google, to find almost everything these days, from gifts they want to buy to information that they need for school or work. When someone puts in a search for something, they input a series of words into the search box which will then pull up a list of search results.
The series of words that people put into the search engine box in order to pull up results are called keywords or key phrases.
For example, a person having trouble training their dog may type 'Golden Retriever training tips' into the search engine box. This will pull up a series of website pages that offer tips on the training of Golden Retrievers.
There are likely to be millions of results for any search that a person conducts on the Internet, and they are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant. For this reason, the websites that are listed on the first and second page in the search results are usually as far as any person will ever get before they decide to rephrase their search.
The position of a website on the search engine results pages is called the website's 'search engine ranking.' Keywords are used to increase a website's search engine rankings and listings.
In the above example, 'Golden Retriever training tips' was a keyword (or keyword phrase). This keyword was used to find tips on training a dog, and the sites that were pulled up by the search engine were believed to contain useful information because they contained the exact phrase that the user was searching for, word for word.
This is why keywords are such an important part of SEO; without the use of keywords, a site will be lost among the millions of websites just like it.
Knowing Which Keywords to Use
In order for keywords to be of any use in moving a site up among the others on the search engine results pages, they must be incorporated into content on a page on that site.
While many people might be able to put their brains to work and come up with a phrase or two that people might be typing in when looking for the information that they have to offer, it is important that keywords and key phrases be used word for word. This is what keyword research is for.
There are different sites out there that offer help with keyword research, and Google is one of the most popular. Keyword research can offer a list of keywords that people are using to find information, as well as information about how often they are using these keywords versus other keywords.
The main objective of keyword research is to find the keywords that are typed into the search engines the most as related to your website and make use of them in your content.
The Search Engines do the Hard Work
Using keywords in website content will not automatically bump that site up to the first page on Google. These things take some time, and consistency is important. In order for this to happen, a person's website must first be noticed by the search engines, namely Google.
From there, the 'Google Bot' crawls the web every now and again and takes a look at all of the pages on the web. It uses a very complicated formula (often referred to as an algorithm) to decide which pages are most relevant, and puts them in order on the results pages.
Those websites that are deemed the most relevant are on the first few pages and those that are the least
relevant are on the last few pages, probably never to be seen.
Keywords are an important part of the art of SEO, probably the most important. For those of you who want your websites to do well and appear toward the top of the search engine pages, knowledge of keywords and their role in SEO is very important.
