What’s the key to Keywords?

In relation to search engines, these are simple the words (or phrases) that the user is searching for. If the keywords occur in your pages you stand a good chance of turning up in the search engine results for that particular search. If they don’t, you won’t. Simple!

Keywords can be used extensively to really help your SERPs, as it is one of the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization. This short guide will explain, in-detail, every part of it. Dominate the ranks, and rake in the targeted Search Engine traffic with these simple tips!

Why should you bother about keywords?

As you should know, keywords are important for non-human visitors to help rank and identify your website. When SEO was in it’s early days, you could barely satisfy both humans and bots, because “keyword stuffing” was the only way to notify the spiders of your content.

However, today the bots are much more smarter and easier to ‘feed’ your information to, they can manipulate text to produce a detail description of your website. Keywords are an important aspect of SEO, and just by following this short guide – you will have your website flourishing with Search Engine traffic.

Identifying Search Terms

Start by considering the sort of terms people would type into a search engine to find a site like yours. For example, if you have a website about console gaming – then your visitors are likely to type terms like “gaming”, “console” or “next-gen”.

Once you have accomplished a few key terms that relate to your site, you should run them through tests to see how ‘popular’ they are. Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool is great for this, as it gives a rough estimation of how many searches are performed for that exact term/phrase.

Implementing Search Terms

Once you have decided on a core set of search terms, you need to ensure that they occur in your pages. You need to make sure that throughout your content, you use the exact keywords you’ve targeted before. They must be identical to your research, even when it comes to punctuation.

In an attempt to implement keywords, many bloggers tend to abuse it, you’re meant to ‘sprinkle’ your content with keywords not flood it. If you swamp your page with keywords (e.g. repeating “SEO tips” 500 times) then you are far more likely to harm your SERPs than improve them as the search engines will regard it as spamming.

What is “Keyword Density”?

This phrase refers to an “optimum” ratio of search terms (i.e. phrases people are likely to be searching for) to page content. If your text has a good smattering of such words or phrases you will be looked kindly by the search engines. However, this again goes back to many bloggers and web-developers abusing this technique and actually hurting their SERPs, just keep that in mind.

Optimum Keyword Density

Unfortunately there’s no such thing; or if there is no-one outside of Google knows the formula! As ever, my advice would be to take a common sense approach, and always write you copy for human readers first and foremost.

So, if your site sells widgets, it makes good sense to ensure that the word widget appears several times – but not too often, where your visitors get sick of seeing it.

Working with the ‘Meta Tags’

There is actually only one tag, but it gets referred to a lot in relation to search engine optimization – erroneously for the most part-simply as “meta tags”. For example, “meta description” is the tag with a name attribute “description”. It looks like this; <meta name=”description”>

What are Meta Keywords?

Meta Keywords was designed to allow you to provide additional text information for crawler-based search engines However, these days virtually all search engines ignore the tag; the consensus is that it’s not worth bothering with.

Frankly, since I got to know that search engines completely omit this attribute of the Meta Family, I’ve totally forgotten about it. In fact, I forgot they even existed till I started writing this article!

Then, what are Meta Descriptions?

The meta-description has some use in search engine optimization, but it won’t actually help improve your ranking. Its usefulness lies in the fact that some searches (Google included) display the description in its search results.

This allows you to create a much targeted piece of text, rather than just letting the search engine grab the chunk of text from your page that just happens to include the search term.

Hmm, can I use page-specific Meta-descriptions?

Of course, in fact it can be a significant positive if you do so. By creating a page-specific meta description for each in your site, you might just encourage  a few extra clicks when your page come sup in a search engine listing. Make sure the text adequately describes the page contents, and what the user will find here.

That’s it!

There we go, everything you need to know about keywords and how it relates to SEO is explained. There really isn’t much more to it than that, except maybe how careful you need to be when choosing your keywords. Perhaps some time in the future, I’ll dedicate a post to help you identify key-terms in common niches.

The idea is to pick out common yet not too competitive words, and try to balance the two. Just don’t forget that subtle variations of very competitive words can still wonders for you.