What are Keywords and Why are they Important?

We all know that just about anyone can put up a website. Due to the almost infinite number of services available to build a site for you, host the site, and put it online, the number of sites on the web are increasing daily. Since there are so many sites your potential customers have to choose from, what is going to make your web site stand out above the crowd and entice people to pay attention to what you have to offer? Competition is fierce and just having a website up and running is not nearly enough to ensure that you are going to be successful.

A website is not quite the same as an actual brick and mortar store where you can easily monitor what the competition is offering then add products of higher quality, or lower price in a bid to attract customers away from the competition. On the internet there are certain criteria that must be met in order for your website to ranked by the search engines, and hopefully be displayed on the first page of the results returned when a prospective customers searches the web using a particular keyword.

What is a search engine, and how do they work? This is where keywords come into the picture. Using relevant keywords will allow your web site to achieve a rank in the search engines. Using services such as Yahoo, Bing and Google, Internet users find the products, services and answers they are seeking by entering a keyword that is relevant to the information they hope to find. When looking for something, a user will type in a word or a question or a phrase. These are called keywords. A keyword search using more than one word is a keyword phrase. Designing your website to make use of these keywords and keyword phrases will lead searchers to your site. For instance, if a person is looking for information regarding how to write a resume, they would type in “resume” or “how to write a resume”. This is the keyword and a keyword phrase. Typing this on a Yahoo or a Google search will bring up a page with a list of results. At the top of the page and on the right side of the page will be what we call “paid results”. These positions on the results page have been paid for by the company selling the service or product. The remainder of the page will be links referred to as “organic search listings” These listings have not been paid for directly but rather are the results of someone implementing a series of tactics know as “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization”. These results are the ones that the search engine you are using has chosen as the most relevant to what you are searching for.

Why are Keywords Important? The keywords and keyword phrases that you focus on are ultimately what will attract traffic to your website. This is the purpose of the website in the first place – to generate as much traffic as possible to enable you to make a profit on your efforts. If you are not utilizing keywords that are relevant to the information, products or services on your website, you will not achieve a satisfactory position in the organic search results making it difficult to attract potential customers, thereby wasting time and money.

Using keywords that are very specific to what you are offering will help you to rank highly in the organic search results resulting in more traffic to your site, and hopefully more sales!

To Your Success,

Mark Freeman

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