SEO for Beginners: Getting Comfortable with Keywords
In the last article, we covered some of the basic principles of Search Engine Optimization
as they apply to the average layperson who simply wants his or her site to appear reasonably high on results pages when potential visitors search on topics related to that of the site.
The rule of thumb I proposed in that article is simply to follow the theme of your article. If your content is true to your intent, then it will be important to readers out there interested in that intent. Just the same, I suggested that there are some basic principles you should follow to make sure that search engines can recognize easily the intent of your page's content, just as there are basic rules of composition that help you put your points across to your readers.
Most of those principles focus on the concept of keywords: those words or phrases you might use to describe the topic of your content and for which potential visitors are likely to search when looking for content like yours.
Choosing keywords that simply describe your content accurately is always a good way to go and, in many cases, will help people to find your site.
But some keywords come up on lots and lots of Web pages. And that means that, in effect, you'll be in competition with every one of those pages for the eyes of potential visitors.
One way to relieve yourself from that competition is to find keywords that describe the topics of your content more specifically, rather than generally. If you have something particular to offer -- a slant on your topic, a particular point of view, or a particular niche interest -- choosing keywords that will help to identify what makes your pages special will help people to find you when they're looking for just those particulars. The more particular you are, the less competition you face and the more visitors you'll attract.
Choosing the Right Keywords
As I've just suggested, the best way to start is to think hard about what makes your content offering specific and valuable: what sets it apart from the crowd and what made you want to offer it in the first place.
But that's not always enough. You may want to take a more technical approach to determining which keywords are right for your site and content.
While there are sophisticated (and expensive) tools available for determining the popularity of specific keywords -- both how popular they are with people searching and how other sites rank for searches performed on those terms -- Google offers a service that's entirely free and as powerful as anything most of us will ever need.
Their Keyword Tool provides ready statistics on particular words or phrases, allowing you to decide how popular each term is and how much competition already exists for each.
But it also helps you by suggesting keywords based on the content you've already added to your site's pages. Give it a try.
Which Comes First: Content or Keywords
Using the Google Keyword Tool opens up an interesting question about the role of keywords in developing your site's content. It's often hard to know what keywords you'll use to describe your content until you've created it. But, it's also vitally important that the keywords you choose become an integral part of the content you'll publish to your pages. So, as you develop your content, you'll want to be thinking about -- and researching -- your keywords at the same time.
Applying Your Keywords
As I explained in the last article, it's important to include those primary keywords in all the places search engines look for reassurance that your content really is about the topic a keyword or key phrase would describe: the page title tag, the keywords meta tag, the titles on the page (identified either by title HTML tags or simply by your use of a bold type face), the image file names and their alt tags.
But most important is the ratio of the number of times a key word or phrase appears to the total number of words on a page. That means your ideal keywords need to factor into your primary content: the body copy on the page.
Here are some more example from my own job-search SEO project. As you'll see from these pages, they're very specific in their topic; and that makes the job of determining keywords pretty easy. It also means that it's easy to use those keyword multiple times within a relatively small amount of content, making sure that those keywords constitute a high percentage of the total text on the page.
Clare MeridewBrian SheppardCarl JonesIn these very special cases, my job is probably much easier than yours. But you have another advantage: if your topic is likely to be truly compelling to potential visitors, they'll be willing to search a little further down their results pages to find sites of interest, particularly yours.
Don't Forget Your Readers
Getting the attention of search engines is important to generating traffic to your site. And some less-than-reputable SEO advisors would suggest writing every sentence so as to include those magic words or phrases anywhere possible. But, while the result may appeal to a search engine crawler, the prose will be almost nonsensical.
And that leads to our next topic: getting other people to link back to your site. Badly written content may (sometimes) appeal to a search engine crawler, but it's also likely to turn off your visitors. Remember that those visitors were the reason you decided to create a site in the first place.
But know, too, that appealing to the people you want to attract may have a secondary benefit that's very important to your ranking with search engines. More on that next time.
SEO for Beginners: Getting Comfortable with Keywords
By: Mr. Knappy-Head
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