Keywords

What are Keywords?

Keywords are the words or phrases users type into search engines to find content. So someone wishing to go to a Shakira concert will type in "Shakira concerts" and will get results listing pages showing Shakira's concert schedule for the year and sites selling tickets to these concerts.

Now Google and the other search engines will want to return relevant pages - not pages such as this one which happen to mention "shakira concerts" as an example illustrating keyword optimisation. The search engines do assume that pages with certain keywords mentioned are automatically relevant and that keywords arn't being included as bait to sell something completely different (or something illegal). But just to be sure, search engines such as Google add other algorithmic checks to ensure they are returning relevant pages. We will get onto that in a later article, but for now, we will concentrate on ensuring you include the correct keywords on your webpage.

Which keywords should I use?

Choosing keywords is the hardest part of search engine optimisation. Your first port of call is old-fashioned brainstorming with a pencil and paper. Ask yourself what you would type into a search engine to find your site if you were a user. Once you have generated your list, type the words into this free keyword suggestion tool. The tool should return a list of related keywords and tell you how many people have searched using those phrases - i.e. you get to find out how popular the keywords are.

The temptation is to go for the most popular keywords - but be warned that everyone else is probably doing the same, and the competition will be fierce. It is better to go for a number of the less popular keywords (the so-called "long tail") where you are more likely to feature on the first page of the results.

How can I tell if there is competition from other sites for a particular keyword?

Simple: just type the phrase into Google to see how many pages are returned. That's every page that has the keyword mentioned. You then want to find out how many webmasters are actually optimising for that particular phrase. Say your keyword is "shakira concerts". Type the following into the search engine:

intitle:"shakira concerts" inanchor:"shakira concerts"

Put your keyword in quotes as illustrated above and lay it out exactly as shown above (no space between the colon and the keyword and a single space between the intitle sequence and the inanchor sequence).

Intitle searches for every site that has those keywords in the title of their page. Inanchor searches for every site that has links to their page from another page using that particular anchor. The number of results returned will be smaller - but these are your competition, as these sites are actively optimising for that word.

Now do the same without the quotes:

intitle:shakira concerts inanchor: shakira concerts

This will return a greater number of results, as the above search is looking for the words, but not in any specific order.

Go through all your keywords and note down the results. You now want to optimise for the keywords that have the least competition that are the most popular.

Once I have my keywords, how do I use them?

The most powerful places to place keywords are in the title of your site or article and in the url. They are always picked up by search engine spiders when they index your site.

The next most powerful place to put keywords is the top third of your site/article. Most search engine bots do not do "deep" indexing, they do not scan your entire text. Instead they look at the first paragraph (some will look at the top third of your site), and decide what is in your page from that. Therefore you need to include your keywords in that area. It's no good having a lengthy introduction to your subject matter and introducing your keywords half-way down your page - by then you will have lost the bots and hence lost the chance of a human reader seeing your work.

What is keyword density?

Keyword density is the frequency the keyword appears in your text. The search bots are looking for words that appear close together e.g. they won't associate the word "shakira" with the word "concert" if they are separated by a hundred words. However if they are next to each other or separated by on a few words, they will link the two as a keyword when producing results. They also look for how frequently the word or phrase appears in a passage. The more frequently it appears the more likely that the text concerned is what the user is looking for, whereas if a word just appears once, it's likely that the word was just used incidently.

The temptation is to realy lard your copy with keywords - but don't. Because the search engines know that webmasters are doing this, they have built into their algorithms checks that reject any page that has a density of more than 4%-7%. So your aim is to have a density that is higher than that of your competitors but less than 4%. (Find your competitors by simply typing the keyword into the search engine and looking at the pages listed above yours)

You can check your density (and check out the density of your competitors' sites) by using this free Keyword Density Tool. Type in the URLs of the pages you are comparing into the box and it will return the frequency each word appears in your text.

Keyword anchors

Finally, to optimise your site fully for the keywords you have chosen, you need to have pages on other sites linking to your site using the particular phrase you are targetting. This is very hard to do as other sites will link to your pages haphazardly, often putting your link on an innocuous (and useless) word such as "click here". It's tempting to pay to have posts that link to your site on specific anchor texts, but note that search engines like Google will penalise you if you do this. There are two ways of getting links to your site using specific anchor texts: one is to attach a blog to your site that links back to the main webpages using the anchor text (a variation is to have a series of articles on your site, all of which link to particular areas of your site using specific keywords as anchor text - this is known as "deep linking". You can also write a series of articles and submit them to article directories, with links to your site on a specific anchor text - this is known as article marketing and I will be covering this in a later post.