What are Keywords?

Keywords

What are Keywords?

Keywords are phrases under which you would want your website to be found in search engines. Keywords are typically two-to-five-word phrases you expect people to search for to find your website. Oftentimes, corporate climates force people to refer to things using special phrases. Keywords are not about what you call your stuff. Keywords are what Joe average surfer (or your prospective site visitors) may type in a search box.

How do You Learn Best?

Some people learn better from video than from reading text. If you like video, you may prefer to look at the Dan Thies keyword research video he mentions near the end of his post on this page:

Focusing a Keyword

When people tell you to target the word free, they are out of their minds. That single word is too general and has too much competition. I just did a search on

Yahoo! for free and it returned 749,000,000 results. That is over 10% of the web trying to use free as a sales pitch.

I am not saying that free should not be on your page; it is a compelling offer on many of mine. I am saying that keywords should define the product or idea. Free alone just does not get this done.

Keyword Phrases

If free isn’t a keyword, then what is? Keywords are typically two-to-five-word phrases you expect people to search for to find your website. What would you expect people to type in the browser to find your site? If you were looking for your product, what would you type? What types of problems does your product or service solve? Those answers are likely good keyword phrases.

Keyword Length

A longer search phrase is typically associated with better targeting and increased consumer desire. Some people say shorter keyword searchers are shoppers and longer keyword searchers are buyers.

As you add various relevant descriptive copy to pages, you are more likely to appear in search results similar to your keywords that do not exactly match your more generic root-term keywords. Most good keyword phrases are generally two to five words.

Keyword Value Pyramid

One of the most fatal flaws of many SEO campaigns is that people think they need to rank well for one term or a few generic terms. Generic terms may occasionally convert, but most strong-converting search terms are specific.

If you read SEO forums you often hear many posts about something like a San Diego real estate agent no longer ranking for a generic term such as real estate. Since the term is too generic for most of his target market (and his service would not be fitting for most people searching for that term), it makes sense that search engines would not want to show his site in those search results. As search continues to evolve, it will get better at filtering out untargeted or inappropriate sites.

Targeting generic terms outside of your area means that you need to use aggressive techniques to try to rank. There are several problems that can go along with being too aggressive:

•       Targeting exceptionally generic terms may not add much value, since the leads are not strongly qualified. Paying extra to rank for more generic terms may not be a cost that is justified unless you can resell those leads at a profit.

•       Being exceptionally aggressive raises your risk profile and makes your site more likely to fluctuate in rankings when new search algorithms are rolled out.

•       Some of the best value is at the bottom of the keyword pyramid. If you spend too much time focused too broadly on the top you may miss some of the exceptional value on the bottom. 

Keyword Density (KD)

Keyword density analyzers end up focusing people on something that is not important. This causes some people to write content that looks like a robot wrote it. That type of content will not inspire people to link to it and will not convert well.

In March of 2005, Dr. Garcia, an information retrieval scientist, wrote an article about keyword density. His conclusion was “this overall ratio [keyword density] tells us nothing about:

•       the relative distance between keywords in documents (proximity);

•       where in a document the terms occur (distribution);

•       the co-citation frequency between terms (co-occurrence);

•       or the main theme, topic, and sub-topics (on-topic issues) of the documents.

Thus, KD is divorced from content quality, semantics, and relevancy.”

Later on I will discuss how to structure page content, but it is important to know that exact keyword density is not an important or useful measure of quality.