What are SEO keywords?

An article looking at keywords within websites, and why their correct use in these sites content is so important. The article also looks at how failing to use keywords can have a negative impact on your website.

SEO Search Engine Optimisation is a method of attracting traffic to a website through the use of text within the website. Within this text are keywords which relate to the search that is being performed. These search results are classed as being ‘natural’ as the language within the text flows correctly and easily picked up by the spiders that search a website’s content in order for it to appear on a search list.

SEO is a hugely important aspect of a website’s marketing and can be the difference between getting 5-10 hits per day and thousands of hits. Everyone wants their website to be ranked highly on search engines and many people will go to great lengths to make sure that the site’s

SEO is of top quality. The text that is contained on a website needs to contain keywords that are likely to be used in searches for a particular topic or roduct. These keywords are often the name of the topic or product itself.

For example if a person wanted to find out about long haired cats they would type the phrase ‘Long haired cats’ into their chosen search engine. This ould then start to crawl or spider the Internet looking for all the websites that had these words contained within them. If a website had the exact phrase ‘long haired cats’ on it, preferably several times, then it would rank highly on the search results. The words ‘long’ ‘haired’ and ‘cats’ all separately would not really have much relevance to the search results, after all these could present
websites about long hair, or just cats in general and the person searching would find these of little or no value to them. This is where the use of SEO comes into play. If you were the owner of a website that was about long haired cats, you would obviously have this term contained within it, or so you would think. However, if you are not aware of SEO you might not use this term at all in your websites content, preferring to use breed names instead, or it might only be
used once or twice. This would result in low rankings and very little traffic to your site.

Keywords are easy enough to think of on a certain topic, but they do require some thought. However, the effort put into thinking about keywords is minor compared to the amount of traffic they can provide for a website. It is important to think about what your website is about and then think of all the terms are the subject that you can. Then from these you can decide on the best keywords, the ones that people are more likely to search for, and use them within the text on the site. Keywords do not need to be long and difficult to spell, in fact the more words that are difficult to spell the worse your rankings could be as many people might not know how to spell them. Some search engines will provide you with the correct spellings and results but it is best to go for simple words that are easily to understand and spell.

Once you have come up with your keywords you then just write the text of your website with those words contained. Good SEO is easy to read and not stuffed with keywords, as this can lead to your site being banned from directories as it is seen as using unfair tactics to gain a high ranking. By using keywords correctly in your text you can achieve a high ranking and attract many visitors to your site.



Adrian McLean is responsible for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), at the leading SEO Company in the UK, to learn more about SEO, please visit www.searchengineoptimising.com.