What are Keywords?
Keywords are the words or phrases you type into the search box when you do a search. When someone types ‘blue widgets’ into the search box, the search engines look for sites that include the words ‘blue widgets’, and returns those as search results.
So, are your keywords showing?
If not, your site will be essentially invisible to searchers. Take a look at your page copy. Are the words you want to be found for on your page? Have you shortened or changed your key phrases without thinking about it? Remember that the search engine spiders that ‘crawl’ your site searching for content are just computer programs, and as such you have to treat them very literally. If you misspell ‘wigit’, they won’t be able to match that up to people searching for ‘widget’. If you talk about ‘our super blue ones’ but don’t mention ‘widgets’, the search engines, likewise, won’t know to make that connection when someone types ‘blue widgets’ into a search box. In short: if you want to be found for a phrase, you must have it on your page exactly as you want it to be found… preferably more than once.
Selecting keywords
So how do you know what search terms, or keywords, to focus on? That depends on your product or service. Certainly you can think of some obvious phrases people would use to search for what you have. But don’t stop there.
Talk to your clients or customers Ask them what terms they might use when doing a search for your product or service. You might be surprised at their answers, and you’ll have new phrases to include on your page.
Try a free Keyword Search Tool. You’ll be surprised what you find. For instance, people searching for real estate in Santa Clarita, California use ‘real estate’ in their search most often. But those looking in nearby Westridge use ‘realty’ a majority of the time.
Is your product or service locally or regionally based? If so, don’t forget to include those words in your page copy. Remember that anyone searching for ‘hotels’ is soon going to find, from the overwhelming number of results, that they need to add a location to narrow their search: “hotels San Francisco” or “Greenwich hotels”. Don’t lose customers by forgetting to include your location, if appropriate.
This is not all there is to keyword selection, of course. There are other paid tools available which will suggest additional related search terms and gives you an idea which terms will be better to target.
Which keywords do I focus on?
Don’t just pick the keywords with the more searches to focus on. When your website is first starting out, the rank won’t be as high, so if you focus on the same keywords as the big, high ranking sites do, you won’t get very far and all the time you spent will be for nothing. So what you should you focus on?
Check to see where your site ranks now for various search terms. Analyze the results – Which pages rank the highest and for which terms? If you have a page ranked at the #100 spot for the top keyword, and a page ranked in the #11 spot for the #5 ranking keyword, don’t focus on the top keyword, focus on the top ranking page. If you can move a page from the 2nd page of results on Google, to the first page, you’re going to get more of an increase in hits than if you moved from page 10 to page 5.
So think about which keywords on which pages will give you the most chance of being seen and being clicked on.
Scoring higher: placing keywords for maximum effect
Make sure your keywords are on your pages using the exact phrasing people will be using when searching for your product or service.
- Put your keywords in the page’s title tag. Search engines rate information in the title tags as very important. (The title tag is the line at the very top of your browser. If you look, you’ll see that the title tag for this page is “Website improvement: keywords 101”.)
Whenever possible, navigation links to the pages on your site should be text links (not images) and include keywords if possible. Link text is considered important by the search engines, so don’t miss this opportunity to make your keyword phrases count.
Don’t get carried away
We know–there’s a tremendous temptation to try to augment your site’s chances of getting found by doing things that will attract the search engines but which have no value for site visitors. Over the years, people have tried many things: stuffing the keyword tag in the HTML with lots of repetitious terms, for instance, or adding ‘invisible’ keywords (typed in the same color as the page background.) It doesn’t take long for the search engines to wise up to these attempts to circumvent their formulas, and they either penalize the perpetrators by banning their sites or simply ignore the input (this is why most search engines pay no attention to the keyword tag these days–because it was so often misused.) Just stick to the rules when it comes to page tags, and use your keywords as often as it seems logical in your text. Repeating a keyword phrase where it’s not needed just makes for a weird experience for your site visitor, and that reflects on the site visitor’s impression of your business.
Up for buying a bridge? Companies that promise
you first-page placement in the search engines
If an SEO company claims it can guarantee you a first-page listing in any search engine, turn and run in the opposite direction. Fast. Search engines are continually refining their formulas as to how to choose the most relevant sites, so no company can make such a guarantee in good conscience. Optimizing your site for the search engines is as much an art as a science, and you should also be aware that there are many companies that use so-called ‘black hat’ tactics which, if discovered, could get your site permanently banned by the engines. Just keep it honest, take advantage of the points made above, and remember that if a company’s claims sound too good to be true, most likely they are.