SEO and Keywords Explained
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
SEO and Keywords Explained
An Overview of Search Engine Optimisation
And the use of keywords
Today we begin a series of posts on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or Keyword selection. I say series as SEO and keyword selection although fairly straight, forward, when you have an understanding of it, can be a rather broad subject and the parameters are always changing!
All too often when researching SEO what you will find is the subject nearly always points at website optimisation. It is necessary to understand here that Search Engine Optimisation and choice of keywords or keyword phrases, applies equally to blog posts and article writing as well.
How does a Search Engine Work
When considering the choice of Keywords or Keyword phrases one first needs to understand how the search engines work.
Whilst it can be said that all search engines have their own particular algorithms they all basically work on the same principle. Search engines are continuously searching the net by means of what they call ‘spiders’. These spiders crawl the net on a constant basis looking at millions of websites searching for the keywords and keyword phrases that people are searching for on the net. These relevant pages, posts or articles are than stored in the Search Engines Data base, and it is here, not the internet per se, that the search engines look when someone searches for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. It is within this Data base that sites get ranked in accordance with particular search terms or phrases.
How does Search Engine Optimisation Improve Your Sites Relevance
As explained above when the ‘spiders’ crawl your site they are looking for particular keywords or keyword phrases, so it is essential your site, post or article is what they call ‘keyword rich’. It is important that your site is ‘rich’ with the keyword or keyword phrase that you wish to be ranked for, making it easier for the ‘spiders’ to find and than rank your site. By doing this you are giving your site more relevance in the eyes of the search engines.
Choosing Your Keywords
There are many tools available to the webmaster on the internet that will rank the relevance of certain keywords and keyword phrases, as well as give figures on how many people are searching those terms in any given period. Some of those being:
- Google’s Adwords Keyword Traffic Estimator
- Microsoft’s AdCentre Keyword Forecast Tool
- Word Tracker
- Keyword Discovery
These are just a few of those available. A little bit of research will bring up more tools.
A tip here in researching your keywords is not to make them too broad. For instance if your website is that of an Indian Restaurant in Sydney, It would make no sense to simply use the broad based keyword term restaurant but rather, Indian Restaurant, Sydney. Also, as the keyword Restaurant is such a competitive search term, you might want to consider less competitive keywords such as ‘diner’ or ‘eatery’ making it less competitive for your site to rank higher.
In conclusion for this post I trust this will give you some insight into the use of Keywords and keyword phrases when it comes to search engine optimisation. In my next post we will look into the appropriate choice of keywords and keyword phrases relevant to your business or website. Meanwhile work with the tools above and do some research into the search terms that will work for your business or site. And in Finishing:
BE Good..BE Well..and..BE Good at It!