What are Keywords?

What are Keywords? A keyword is a word or phrase that a person may use to find relevant web pages and information on the internet.

If you place the term “business” in the search box of any search engine the word “business” is the keyword. Google will find the most relevant pages from its index for that word and return them to you in a matter of seconds.

If you are a web searcher then it is very important that you choose the most relevant and specific words related to what you are searching for so that you get the best results (web pages) for your search from the search engine. One of the reasons that Google is so popular is that it does provide the most specific results targeted to a searcher’s keyword. Searching on the web for information becomes a very frustrating exercise if you cannot easily find what you are looking for.

If you are a website owner then it is very important that you use specific keywords related to your subject or business in your web pages so the search engines will index your page correctly. This process is called Search Engine Optimization and is a specialized service offered by website developers and other professionals on the internet. A website, when constructed properly, is set up with specific keywords placed intentionally in the structure of the site so the search engine crawlers index the web page easily and properly.

What are keywords for this particular page? Useful keywords would be words and phrases such as:

keyword, keywords, keyword research, keyword search, keyword selection, keyword searches and so on.

The choice of keywords for a website, web page and domain name are very important and require considerable time and effort with research and analysis. This research is done to ensure that your keywords give you the very best chance to rank high in the search engines. There are many keyword research tools available on the net such as the very popular WordTracker and the free service, Google Keyword Tool.

The choice of keywords will be part of your website development using the information you give him about your business. If he/she is good at what they do they will perform this keyword research and set your site up using search engine optimization best practices.

This may all seem too hard but the way to look at this is that you are building a strong foundation for your website much as you would want a strong foundation for your home. The work done in the initial stages of your website development will serve you well into the future. What are keywords? Your bread and butter! Websites that are not set up in this way end up in a virtual wasteland on the web as far as visitors to the website are concerned. No visitors: No customers: No money! There is that bottom line again.