What is a keyword?

A keyword is primary thought or concept regarding the content of a web site. Although we often make reference to a keyword, in reality a keyword is a phrase of between two and four words. If you have ever done a web search for something, especially something common, you will see that the search results can be in the thousands or even in the millions. Your search results will potentially include sites from all over the world, with a variety of information ranging from educational to sales oriented.

How can someone ever sort through those types of results or narrow down what element of those results they are looking for?

First they can expand their search terms: Instead of simply searching for widgets, maybe we should search for blue widgets. We will notice that the overall numbers of search results is down in comparison to our first search for simply “widgets”. By including an additional search term we helped to weed out sites that would not interest us, such as a site that only carried yellow widgets as an example. Next if we are looking for our blue widgets from a store or location near us we could also add the operator to our search of our state. Notice how the numbers of search results declines so dramatically with each term that we add. Next, if we want to be real specific with our search we could add our city

By adding all of these qualifications to your search, you’ve eliminated a lot of results that you would probably find to be irrelevant to what you are really looking for. So when we are developing keywords for our site, we would like to try to match the best searches as closely as possible, thus producing a highly pre-qualified visitor to our site. We are also then providing the search engine with the information that it needs to cull from our site to be able to rank our site near the top. This has additional benefits for us too. One of the benefits of being near the top is of course additional click through to our site, which in turn gives some of the search engines added fodder for listing our site near the top when search sting is still relevant, but maybe not so long.

As you can see from the above example, well thought out keyword phrases are not just important but are actually imperative to your site’s success.