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.

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