Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Importance of keywords


Most people who put up a website (designers included) don't realize that the right keywords on your website will improve your search engine rankability.

When a person goes to a search engine like Google or others, they type in a word or phrase that they want information on. This is what we call a keyword. For instance if the person was looking to buy a new golf club, he might type in 'golf clubs' or 'golf shop' or another variation. So if you were a golf store you would want to have those and other related keywords within your site.
  
       You can still include one word sequences among your keywords but if they are not supported by additional expressions you will not achieve high placements. As an example, if you have a site about cats, ‘cat’ is naturally a compulsory keyword, but you still have to optimize it for other words, such as ‘cat owners’, ‘ cat breeds’ or ‘cat food’ to have success with. This example is not the absolute truth on how to properly optimize a cat site, but shows you the direction of how you should think when selecting the keywords for your website.
      
          Usually, as you begin the optimization process you have to think about the keywords best describing the content of your website and what are users more probably to use to find your site. One aspect to take in consideration is synonyms. Quite frequently users will another word for the same thing. In the provided cat site example, ‘feline’ is a synonym and most certainly there are going to be users who will use, thus is it recommended to incorporate it here and there on your web pages. However, don’t exaggerate it and optimize for every single synonym that comes into your mind as search engine algorithms will include most synonyms in the keyword match, more even for languages like English.

You should come up with more keywords probably used to describe your website. It is recommended to think thematically as search engines are inclined to give a higher rating to the page if it is part of a site and its theme match the keyword sequence. From this point of view it is vital for your site to be centered on a specific theme, for instance cats. It might not be easy to find all the applicable keywords by your own, but luckily there are tools for it. One such tool is the Website Keyword Suggestion Tool that will help you establishing the theme of your website and also the keywords matching the theme. Google’s Keyword Tool is another excellent tool for more ideas on the keywords to be used.

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