What Keywords Are And What They Mean For Your SEO

So you have your website up and running. You are looking forward to doing business and making money online. You need customers, of course! One way that you can get them is by ranking highly on the search engine results pages. Improving your rank is a common process called search engine optimization, or SEO. If you're going to start optimizing your website, you need to know a little something about keywords.



The definition of a keyword is very simple. It is nothing more than the word or phrase that a search engine user plugs into the search bar when they go looking for something. Where a "search term" becomes a "keyword" is in the realm of search engine optimization. The specific search queries that you are trying to capture and bring to your website are your keywords.



Choosing your keywords is a process that deserves a lot of thought. There are volumes of advice and plenty of tools available to help you. The general points that you can keep in mind are frequency and specificity. Very popular and very general keywords get searched for very often. This means that competition for them is fierce and that improving your search engine ranking for them will be hard. Less common and more specific keywords offer you a trade-off: There will be fewer searches on them, but also fewer competitors optimizing for them.



The first place that you can begin incorporating keywords into your website is within its HTML code. Page titles that feature your chosen keyword will attract the attention of search engine indexers. Remember that keywords that appear in your URLs count in your favor as well, so avoid generic addresses. You can also put keywords into the behind-the-scenes code, like meta tags, that your website visitors don't see. The search engines will still pick up on them!



Next, and more importantly, you want to use your chosen keywords in your website's content. This has to be a fairly organic process; keywords should appear because they flow naturally into the content that you write. It is hard for search engines to detect the inclusion of random, unrelated keywords. Live visitors certainly pick up on it, though! You should never sacrifice your visitors' experience of your website for the sake of search engine rankings.



Finally, you need to be aware of the overall keyword density that your website has. This is normally expressed as a percentage: the amount of overall content and code on a particular page that is made up of your chosen keyword. Be very careful about your density. More is definitely not better in this measurement. Many search engines use keyword density as a yardstick to detect content-free "spam" pages that do not need to be presented to their users. In order to avoid this, try to keep the keyword density of any given page below 5%.



As you get deeper into the search optimization process, you are going to learn much more about keywords and how to incorporate them into your site. This article hopefully gives you the basic groundwork you'll need to get started, but in order to keep your optimization efforts productive, you'll want to add a great deal more to your fund of keyword knowledge.