A Keyword By Any Other Name

It doesn’t matter what you call it, a keyword will always be . . . well, a key word or phrase around which your Web site content is centralized. A single word is sometimes not enough to narrow the possibilities for a Web site, which is why some keywords are actually keyword phrases or keyphrases. It’s the same concept — a centralized theme — just using more than one word. I use the term keyword generically to mean both keywords and keyphrases. Web crawlers are programs that travel around the Internet examining and categorizing Web pages by keyword. That’s how search engines, like Google, know to return your Web site when someone searches for a specific keyword or phrase. The crawler has already had a look-see and has placed your Web page into a category along with all the other sites on the Web that fit into that category. Keyword marketing, then, is using that keyword or phrase to market your Web site. Advertisements for a Web site, product, or service are designed using the keyword or keyphrase as the “foundation” for the ads. Then, when Internet users search for that keyword, the ads are displayed in the search results. Google then takes this process one step further by placing ads on Web pages that are built around — or optimized for — that keyword. So, whoever said a picture is worth a thousand words didn’t realize the Internet would come along
and reduce that value to just one or two — three at the most.

Optimizing Your Site for Search Engines

Search engine optimization is a lot like trying to catch the steam that you breathe on a old winter day. You can see it. You know it exists, but there’s no way to actually contain and quantify the steam. You can see the results of SEO and you can figure out how best to chieve it, but it’s still possible to do everything right and not achieve the ultimate goal — landing the very first listing on a search engine results page, or SERP. Good news though, you don’t necessarily want to be the very top listing on a SERP. Think about this — how often do you click the first search result and not go any farther? Even if you find exactly what you’re looking for on the first page you jump to, you still click through some of the other results just to make sure the first page isn’t lying to you. As a general rule, I go through the listings of about ten results pages, just to make sure I’m getting the best info. Admittedly, I may be a little more patient than your average searcher. Most people don’t go much deeper than the second page of results. Because you should probably be targeting your Web site to normal folks rather than obsessive-compulsive types like me, you want your Web site to fall somewhere on the first or second page of results. If it does, you’re fine — you can count your search marketing efforts a success, even if your site isn’t at the very tippy-top of the first SERP. Achieving that first- or second-page placement isn’t a sure thing — it requires a little effort on your part. You can take a number of steps to ensure a better search engine ranking — steps I get to in a bit — but the most important piece in your SEO puzzle involves the keywords on which your Web site is based. You do have keywords, right? If not, you need them. However, not just any keyword will do, which the next section makes clear.