Understanding The Importance of Keywords

Understanding The Importance of Keywords
When you use a search engine, you type in a word or words and click the Search button. The search engine then looks in its index for those words.

Suppose that you typed keyword research. Generally speaking, the search engine looks for:

Pages that contain the exact phrase keyword research.

Pages that don’t have the phrase keyword research, but do have the words keyword and research in close proximity.

Pages that have the words keyword and research somewhere, though not necessarily close together.

Pages with word stems; for instance, pages with the word research and the word key somewhere in the page.

Pages that have links pointing to them, in which the link text contains the phrase “keyword research”.

Pages with links pointing to them with the link text containing the words “keyword” and “research”, although not together.

The process is actually a lot more complicated. The search engine doesn’t necessarily show pages in the order that I just listed – all the pages with the exact phrase, and then all the pages with the words in close proximity, and so on. When considering ranking order, the search engine considers (in addition to hundreds of secret criteria) weather the keyword or phrase is in:

Bold text
Italicized text
Billeted lists
Text larger than other text found on the page
Heading text ( tags)

Despite the various complications, however, one fact is of paramount importance: If a search engine can’t relate your Web site to the words that someone searches for, it has no reason to return your Web site as part of the search results.

Picking the right keywords is critical. As Woody Allen once said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” If you don’t play the game, you can’t win. And if you don’t choose the right keywords, you’re not even showing up to play the game. If a specific keyword or keyword phrase doesn’t appear in your pages ( or in links pointing to your pages), your site will not appear when someone enters those keywords into the search engines. For instance, say you’re a technical writer in Texas, and you have a site with the term technical writer scattered throughout. You will not appear in search results when someone searches for technical writer Texas if you don’t have the word Texas in your pages. You simply will not turn up.