Keywords
It's amazing how many people get this wrong. A successful SEO
campaign has to be based upon an understanding of what keywords are
and how they are used by both users and search engines. In fact, you can get
everything else right, but if you aren't targetting the right keywords, your
SEO campaign will fail.
What are keywords?
When a user types a word or phrase and hits the search button, those words are
magically transformed into keywords. The search engine companies take those
keywords and make decisions about which pages within their index the user is
most likely to be interested in.
What are keyphrases?
A keyphrase is simply two or more keywords taken together. Keyphrases have
become important as users and search engines have become more sophisticated.
For example, suppose a user types into the search box the keyphrase
"search engine optimization". Also suppose that, somewhere on the web, there
exist two (very small) pages, page1 and page2.
Page1 contains the following text:
"Search engine optimization is fun and easy to do!"
Page2 contains the following text:
"Search for an engine where no optimization is needed."
It seems reasonable to argue that page1 is more likely to be of interest to
the user performing the search. Both pages contain 9 words, and both use each
of the users keywords once each, but page1 also matches the exact phrase
that the user entered. This is a very simple - and slightly silly - example of
why keyphrases have become important.
Keyword Competativeness
Not all keywords are created equal. Hundreds of thousands of users
search on the term "Britney Spears" every day, whereas "rock
tumbling equipment" might be used as a search term less than a hundred times in
a day. In general, the more popular a keyphrase, the more sites are going to be
trying to rank highly on it. The more sites that are competing for a particular
phrase, the harder it becomes to reach your goal of appearing on the first
page. Of course, if you do make it onto the first page for one
of these highly competative terms, the volume of traffic that can be generated
is staggering.
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