Keywords are the most important factor for your website. Keywords are the “key” elements to your internet success and they have to be chosen very carefully and sometimes it‘s advisable to get professional help in order to bring the optimal search engine performance.
Lets explain what search engine keywords are
Keywords are basically words that regular people use when the search in search engines. Those are words and phrases that describe what they are looking for. For example when you go to google and youre trying to find website manufacturing or selling sun glasses you type in “sunglasses” and you get a number of websites containing the term “sunglasses”. This is called Keyword. When people get too broad number of results then they look for specific type of sunglasses they look using further description like “sports sunglasses” which now is a bit more precise and will show quite smaller but more relevant number of results. This is called key-phrase. Key phrase is a phrase containing more than one keyword.
Using the same pattern of logic, keywords are simply words that users/regular people describe products and services while searching on the internet. Technically every word can be used as keyword, but regular internet users use some specific words more than others and thats why choosing the proper keyword is very important as some keywords can bring you tons of traffic compared to other that are quite less popular.
The best way to find the best keywords for your website is to ask somebody that doesn’t know anything about you and your business and ask him to describe what you do or sell. In this way youre going to get the customers type of wording not the technical terms that you might use to describe them yourself.
When you get a list of keywords and key phrases, its advisable to use some internet free tools that show the approximate number of searches each keyword was used during some period of time. Such keyword suggestion tools are Overture, Wordtracker and Google. They show (some even with numbers) how many searches were done in the period of one month and some suggestions on similar phrases containing your keywords.
You should choose the top 20 keywords that describe your product or services. Also its advisable that one should search on google for example for each keyword phrase using the quotes (for example “sports sunglasses” ) and get the amount of websites that rank for that particular term. The lower this number is, the easier you will rank for those keywords. Note that its recommended that you start with some less popular key phrases and then fight for the highest ranking ones because in the beginning your website wont be able to fight for the top rankings on highly competitive terms. When your website ages and gets a lot of backlinks, then you will be able to get the top rankings.
Note that each page (not website but only a page from the website) should be optimized for not more than one keyword and one phrase containing that particular keyword. If you try to optimize it for more than one, they you will melt the keyword priority and you might not rank well. Also be advised that its best to use niche targeted websites and therefore have each website targeting one major keyword and each page should contain that keyword and different phrases of that keyword. This brings maximal performance and if you can have that same keyword in the domain name then your success is guaranteed.
For more information on keyword use please see the next articles on title, description, headings, page optimization and off-site optimization.
