As you get deeper into web marketing, the importance of keywords will gradually start to dawn on you. Keywords and keyword phrases are at the heart of how every search engine works.
Why keywords are essential for SEM
The way search engines (SE) work is something like this:
1. SEs send their “spiders” to “crawl” the web on a regular basis. They are constantly out there crawling. As they go, they analyze and digest the content of new and existing web pages.
2. SEs analyze the content of these pages primarily by reading the text and other explanatory material called “meta-information” contained therein. They select words and word combinations and “index” this information for future reference.
3. SEs make certain assumptions about the importance of keywords and phrases found within pages. For example, if a keyword is found in a PAGE TITLE, it is considered more important than if it is found anywhere in the text of the page. If you are in a PRIMARY HOLDER, the same reasoning applies. If it is in BOLD TEXT, that can also indicate its additional importance. Etc.
4. This information (the “indexed” information) is used to complete search results. If someone searches for “Joe Blow plumbing” and your pages don’t reference “Joe Blow plumbing” then your pages won’t appear in those search results.
5. If you want to be found with specific search terms, for example “homes for sale in Toledo”, you must include those search terms (keywords) in your web pages. These are usually called TARGET KEYWORD PHRASES or MOST IMPORTANT KEYWORDS.
How does this apply to you?
Are you getting the idea? To win at the search game you have to think like a search engine.
That means you need to clearly explain what each page is about. Thinking like a search engine means you shouldn’t make your visitors read between the lines to figure out what your content is about.
For example, if a particular web page is about “Punkydoodles Corners houses”, then search engines should be able to see that clearly and then put it in their database: “This page is about Punkydoodles Corners houses”. In other words, decide which keywords you want to focus on and make sure you include them in all the most important places.
Win in the search game
That makes it important to anticipate which keywords and keyword phrases people will use when searching for your product or service, and then use those exact terms in the text of your pages.
There are important ways to focus your content so that search engines recognize the topic of each page. But to keep it simple, the more you say about your specific target search term, the more likely you are to score well.
Common sense, right? Optimizing a page means focusing on a specific term and striving to emphasize that search term in the text of your page.
It’s not magic. It’s common sense. If a page has a lot of content focused on a specific keyword, it will usually score well for that term.
