If you want to find anything on the Internet, you go to a search engine and type a word or phrase in the search box. After a second or two, the search engine will provide a list of search engine results which give a title, link to the website, and short description about the website.
Website owners want to know what items or services you are searching for and will spend time and money to learn through keyword research. If you own a business and are creating a website, it is important to know about keywords and their impact on your website’s success. Continue reading to learn more.
A keyword in any article you read on the internet is a word, or phrase, which is used multiple times in an article or on a website page. It is also the word or phrase most often used when searching for information on the World Wide Web. You may ask the question, “How long should keywords be and how do you choose them?”
When search engines first started, short keywords – one or two words – were commonly used. If you wanted to learn about baseball, you would type the word “baseball” into the search box. Millions of results would show up in the results. These days, however, it is common to use long tail keyword phrases – those phrases often have as many as five words in them. Using the example of the baseball search, now you might use phrases like “famous baseball players of 1985” or “where to buy baseball gloves”. The more specific the keyword phrase, the better your results would be. If your niche is baseball, choosing the right keywords, whether one word or up to five in a keyword phrase, has the ability to bring more traffic to your website.
Internet experts suggest that users choose the Google search engine nearly 80% of the time for conducting internet searches. Google and other search engines crawl the internet looking for the keywords used on websites and then indexes them based on specific criteria which changes periodically. Taking time to research the best keywords for your website can help it reach higher on the search engine results which will also bring more visitors to your site.
Google uses an algorithm called Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI. This algorithm calculates the relevancy of the keywords on your website. Using other vocabulary on your website, Google will then be able to differentiate between someone looking for a baseball glove or the Chicago Cubs baseball team based strictly on the keywords used in the text. The LSI also recognizes other words related to a specific term as well as synonyms for the keyword. The more keywords related to your topic, including secondary keywords, the more likely the person will find your website because they searched for the right terms.
Conversely, if you are using the wrong keywords on your website, or not using them in conjunction with secondary keywords or long tail keywords, the less likely anyone will find your website. To avoid this problem, it is important to learn how to do keyword analysis to ensure you are using the right keywords on your website. This will help you to optimize your websites with these new keywords.
Since keywords are so important, it is imperative that you know how to research to find the best ones. There are a number of options for conducting keyword research. The Google Keyword Research tool is available as is the Wordtracker tool. Either of these, along with others you can find online, can help you start researching keywords that pertain to your business. Not only will these tools provide suggestions for keywords that you may not have concidered using on your website, they can also information on how many users type in that keyword when searching for items or services and the amount of competition that keyword has among other websites.
Consider using keywords and keyword phrases of varying lengths. Sometimes using longer keyword phrases will bring in additional traffic. You may also want to use your main keyword in the website’s domain name as well as use it when linking to articles on your blog. These are things that may help increase traffic to your site.
Anyone who runs a website understands how important keywords are. Finding and using the right keywords will drive traffic and potentially, sales, to your site. Once you understand the importance of keywords, and how to use them effectively, you can expect your website to rise in search engine results.