subject: Keywords, Keyphrases - What Does It All Mean [print this page] Anybody who has a website these days and has looked into website marketing has inevitably come across the terms key words or key phrases. Knowing what these words really mean and how SEO analysts use them to boost your website's search engine results may be a whole other story.
To start, I will explain how search engines work using Google as an example as it is the most commonly used search engine to date.
Search engines have a job and that is to give you, the searcher, what you are looking for. You the searcher, in your quest for information, will type a particular set of words into the search engine to find your results. The search engine doesn't want to let you down so they observe a criterion in scanning websites in search for the perfect results. One of those piece of criteria is whether your website has a particular set of keywords or phrases that the searcher has used to look for you with.
Now, you might say, I don't want my website to look like it is full of search terms and you would be correct in saying this. This is called keyword stuffing and you and your website could be penalized for doing this. So how many times can one keyword be used on a page without a site getting penalized? It is felt that 9 to 15% is a nice ratio. To evaluate the number of keywords in your text, there is a formula, or one can simply use free software available online to evaluate their keyword density in contrast to the number of words in the text.
Hiring professional writers who can integrate keywords naturally into your text is key. You don't want your pages to appear like spam and yet you do want it to meet Google's algorithms. Understanding how Google searches pages is not truly known by anybody as it is kept somewhat under wraps, but through experience, I can tell you the software is able to observe general relevancy in addition to the keywords.
The second element to all of this is that the value of keyword density will hardly ever come from your main content, but rather from the optimization of all the other factors on your page. Keywords are not only taken into consideration from your main text, there are other elements Google's spiders scan, they include:
Page title
Meta Tags
Meta Description
Images Description
Headers Tags
Having a blog with fresh content full of keywords and keyphrases is also very important in the SEO world.
But which keywords or phrases do you use, you might ask? Maybe you have an inclination of how people are looking for you, but do you know for sure the words you have in mind are exactly what the searcher is using? If not, your SEO specialist can find this out for you as well as discover more words and phrases you should be using.
Let's say for example you sell vacuums. What will your potential buyer type into the search engine to find you? Will they type 'vacuums' or will they type in 'vacuums for sale' or even 'cheap vacuums'? The word vacuums alone has over six million websites competing for it. So the next step a SEO analyst will do is find phrases used frequently by others but are not as competitively sought after by website owners. By doing this, it gives your website a leg up and a better chance to move to the top.
Sure you could pay for keywords doing what is called Pay Per Click. But what we are discussing are organic results, the results that show up in search engines for free. Ultimately every company wants to show up for free on the first page of a search engine and ideally at the top. This can save companies tens of thousands of dollars.
Search engine optimization is always changing and evolving, but one thing that has remained most consistent is the continued value and use of keywords.
