What are Keywords
Posted by Shane Quigley on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 in Digital Marketing, SEO
Keywords are strings of words, which relate to your product or service that people would type into a search engine, if they were looking for your product or service. They are used within the metadata of your site and also need to occur within the main text of your site, along with a number of other places.
Keywords and phrases are the most important part of the planning and strategy phase of web site development. It is imperative that a great amount of research and customer profiling goes into deciding which keywords and phrases to use. They are a major deciding factor once your site has been indexed, as to how your campaign will perform. They could be the fine line between success and failure in many cases.
Deciding which keywords and phrases to use is a laborious task. You need to step away from your knowledge of your company and your product and imagine you are a complete stranger to your offering. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who needs the information or service you have, or someone who has a specific problem to solve which you can help with. Then you will be getting close to finding the keywords and phrases you need. Ask friends and family, who do not know much about your subject, to tell you what they would type into a search engine, be sure not to prompt them in anyway, you need quality results.
Once you have decided on your keywords and phrases, enter them into either overture search term tool or wordtracker, to get a better idea of who is searching for what. You can then refine your keywords and phrases, in-line with traffic levels for each word and decide upon 3 to 5 main key phrases, depending upon the size of your site or the competitiveness of those terms.
Once keywords and phrases are decided, you need to start to theme each pages content around one of those phrases. A common mistake is to try and create content that covers all bases but realistically achieves nothing accept dilution of keyword density and therefore lessens your chance of gaining high rankings for those phrases.
