Keywords and Search Engine Results

keyword optimization search engine rankings

When the HTML language was created, it included a keywords meta tag. The creator of a site could insert a list of keywords for each web page in that tag. In the early days of the internet, adding the right keywords would give you a good placing in the search engine results page.

It’s not that easy anymore. The use of the keyword tag was so badly abused that the major search engines no longer even look at the keyword tag. Keyword optimization is an art and science of its own now.

Keyword Research

The first step is to determine which keyword phrases are the best ones to target for your website. Begin by compiling a list of phrases, consisting of two to four words each, that you think someone might enter in a search engine if they were searching for a site like yours. Next you need to determine the number of actual searches for those phrases.

In my early days as a web designer I thought I had a great idea for a site to create a recurring income for myself – a directory of golf instructors. I would set up a listing by state/city of golf instructors and they would pay me an annual fee for a listing and web page describing their teaching practice.

I ran my idea by a web guru I was doing some work for who has made millions on the internet. He thought it was a really good idea, except for one thing – almost no one searches for golf instructors on the internet. How did he know that?

There are programs and websites that provide counts for the number of searches for a given keyword phrase. When I checked “golf instructor,” the results were less than ten searches per day.

At the other end of the spectrum are keyword phrases that large numbers of people are searching for. For example “make money online” has over 2,700 searches daily - sounds great. The only problem is that 396,000,000 web pages are already focusing on those same keywords. Trying to get to the top of a search engine with that much competition is nearly impossible.

If you’re relying heavily on search engines to provide traffic to your site, you need to find a niche where there are a good number of daily searches, with minimal competition.

It can be helpful to add geographic limiters to your search phrases. For example, rather than just targeting “financial advisor” you could try “financial advisor Columbus Ohio.”

Keyword Usage

Once you’ve pinpointed the keyword phrases you want to use, you need to add the keywords in as many areas of your site as possible – page titles, file names, content in articles, tags for images, etc. Some of those areas are only accessible through the html code, but it is very important to use the keywords, in a natural way, in the text content of the site. One a related note, this means that it is difficult for sites that are heavy on graphics and light on text to place well in the search engines.

What the search engines are trying to refine is a method that allows them to place websites that have legitimate, useful content at the top of the search results. No tricks are necessary, and if you do attempt something sneaky, your site may be penalized and drop in ratings or disappear from the search engine results.

 

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