Why Use Keywords And Keyword Phrases

Keywords are a venerable institution on the web. Long ago, when AOL was one of the lone pioneers (along with Compuserve - remember them?), they catalogued websites by using keywords. At first, you told AOL what you wanted your keyword to be; later, they sold keywords to you. That keyword, whether it was roses or dogs or computer software, was the most important search method on the Internet.

Then Alta Vista, the web's first search engine, came along. It catalogued pages by the phrases it found in the metatags in the header of the web page. (Metatags are places you can put keywords and descriptive phrases and not have them show up on the web page itself.) This worked pretty well for a while

Then people found out you could abuse the metatags. Webmasters who ran adult sites would simply look for the most popular search terms online and put them in the metatags. No matter that dolphin, cooking equipment, and running shoes had little or nothing to do with the content on their pages - they'd use them simply because it caused their rankings in search engines to go up.

This was the birth of keywords as we know them.

Keywords and Keyword Phrases

Keywords and keyword phrases are words and/or phrases the search engines look for when they catalog your site. Search engines only work if they can return relevant content to the people who are using them to search, so it's very much in their interest to find articles that go well with the search terms people insert in the search box.

Search engines look for keywords in several places:

• In the metatags at the beginning of a web page
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• Within the header tags of a web page
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• n the body of text on a web page, especially in the first paragraph and the last paragraph

If your page is about cooking, for instance, you want to look for keywords like cooking, recipes, utensils, ingredients, etc. to trigger the search engines to properly catalog the web page. And you want to put in enough keywords that the search engine will understand that this is an important page on that topic, not just mentioning the keyword; yet not so many keywords that your content is unreadable for the people who browse to it. Most keyword article writers think between 3% and 7% of your words being keywords or keyword phrases is optimal.

If you have trouble doing this yourself, you can always look at purchasing private label rights articles. These are articles produced in bulk about topics you can share with customers visiting your website. When you purchase private label rights articles, they're already keyword optimized, and you have the option of modifying them in any way you please. It's also an inexpensive way of getting good content on your website.

Even specially-optimized keyword articles aren't perfect, though. You may optimize content, only to find that your site is not ranking high at all with the keywords you want. There are several other variables that can affect search engines (though the exact recipe they use to determine where your page falls is a closely-guarded secret, and it changes periodically anyway).

How Search Engines Work

Search engines use a text-based algorithm to determine where your site falls in their rankings, part of which depends on the keywords you use, where in your document you use them, and how they're used. But they look at keywords in another place as well: the links that connect to your site.

If you've participated in link exchanges with other webmasters or if you've donated articles to article directories, search engines will observe and record these links. If your main keyword is not in these links, you've wasted your time developing the links and the content. But if your keyword is included in the links in some way, it will strengthen your website's relationship with that keyword.

This is one of the most powerful search engine tools you have. Use it.

In addition, search engines check to see if you've updated your content recently, and whether the content you're providing is very similar or the same as content on another page. Frequent updates will raise your search engine ranking. Content that looks like another site, whether you've been plagiarized or not, can lower your ranking or eliminate it entirely. Private label rights articles are a good way to maintain a bank of continually-fresh content for your page that's pre-optimized. Even if you like to write content yourself, it's good to have a few around for heavy times like Christmas season, when you may run out of your own articles.

And that's really about all there is to it.

One More Thing

When you optimize your site for the search engines, be certain you retain its ease of use for humans, too. That's who it's written for. And a number 1 rated site, no matter how content-rich or how hard you've worked to improve its ranking, is absolutely worthless if your viewers look at it and then click away.