Why Keywords Matter

If you've had any experience of trying to set up a blog or a website and tried to make money out of it, odds are you have come across the term keywords. Quite often there is a sort of mystique about what keywords are and how important they are.

A keyword is very simply any term that anyone enters into a search engine box when they are looking for something.The search engine then delivers a number of results back to you based on their searching web pages based on that term.

The logic goes that if you want your web site or web page to be amongst those that are delivered back to the reader, the you need to have the keywords magically ready in your site for the search engines to find.It is estimated that most people will only ever look at the first three page results of Google or Yahoo, if that.

Many people will only look at the first page or first few results.There are two separate but related issues here that are worth separating out.First is SEO or search engine optimization or the whole process of how search engines find your site and deliver it to the first few pages of results and the second is keywords, which are one component of SEO.

The whole process of SEO has grown up very quickly over the internet since the days of Alta Vista, unsurprisingly, because a front page result will hugely increase the traffic to your site.

With the growth of SEO has come a whole industry of experts who will tell you ( and often charge you a lot for doing so) how to make yours it hit the top of the charts. There is no doubt that a lot of people spend a lot of time and a lot of money investing in this process and for some it pays off.

Reality is that Google and other search engines guard very jealously their algorithms and other tools that they use to evaluate how good and important a website is.However keywords do play a part and it is worth spending a bit of time doing some basic work around them if you are setting up a site.

Firstly do some research yourself around what people are looking for to get a general sense of what words they are using.There are several keyword tools around like Wordtracker or Googles own AdWords tool.These will give you some idea of the terms people are looking for.When you have decided on keywords use the main one in the title of your website and in your URL if possible.

This does seem to make a difference.Use keywords throughout your site but use them sparingly.Use keywords as a way of generating decent content that people will want to read.When people put a term in Google or yahoo it isn't an exact science, they are just looking for information and almost guessing a term that seems appropriate to them.

It stands to reason that if you create a site with the content that people are looking for then the search engines will find you, thats what they do -focus on content and use the keywords as a hook for great writing. Good Luck