Why Search Engine Keywords Are Important

Why on earth would you care about search engine keywords when making a website? Well, finding the most searched keywords can make the difference between a winning and losing website. Here’s why, and how to find and use keywords successfully on your website…

Imagine for a second that you own a fruit store. You have the most delicious apples in your store. None of them are selling! Why? You don’t know it, but people are really looking for pears. If you had known it, wouldn’t you have sold pears instead?

That might be a very simple example, but the principle holds true for websites too. If you know what people are looking for, you can give it to them and gain a lot of visitors!

How Do I Find Out What People Want?

Most of the visitors to your website will be people who started out looking for information. The first place that these people go to look for the information, is their favorite search engine, like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.

Once at the search engine, the person will type in a “keyword” (one or more words) that they think describes what they are looking for. The search engine then returns a results page containing a list of what it thinks are the most relevant websites that provide the information that the person was looking for.

Search engines keep statistics of the keywords people use when looking for information. These search engine keywords statistics are made available through various services to make it possible to find the most searched keywords.

Using these keyword tools and services, you can then build a list of the most searched keywords that are relevant to the topic of your website. Armed with such a list of search engine keywords, you can now begin to make your own website.

How Do I Use The Search Engine Keywords?

Search engines analyze web pages to figure out which pages to return to visitors looking for information. Among other things, they look at words on the page to figure out what the topic of the page is.

This means that you should select one keyword (remember, one or more words) and make that keyword the topic of a web page. You can use two or three closely-related keywords on that page as well, but the focus should be on the selected keyword.

Your job now is to place the keyword(s) you selected for your page in the proper places to help the search engines understand what the topic of your page is.

Where Do I Place The Keywords?

There are several elements on a web page that should contain your selected keyword. They are:

• Page name: Your keyword becomes you page name. Separate multiple words with hyphens, e.g. my-keyword.html.
• Title: Use your keyword once in your page title.
• Description: Use your keyword once in your page description.
• Keywords: Needless to say, add your keyword to your page keywords.
• Headline: Use your keyword once in your page headline.
• Body Text: Use your keyword about once for every 100 words in your page content text.

Remember, the goal here is to help the search engines understand what your page is about. It is not to try and trick the search engines.

By researching search engine keywords and using the most searched keywords on your web pages, you place your website in a good position to get targeted visitors, which is exactly what you want!

To get more detail on how to use your keywords on your web pages, see my article on website optimization.