As you get deeper into web marketing, the importance of keywords will gradually start to be realized. Keywords and keyword phrases are at the core 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 out 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 mainly by reading the text and other explanatory material called “meta-information” contained in them. 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 somewhere in the text of the page. If it is in a PRIMARY HEADLINE, the same reasoning applies. If it is in BOLD TEXT, that may also indicate its extra importance. And so.
4. This information (the “indexed” information) is used to complete the search results. If someone searches for “Joe Blow Plumbing” and your pages do not refer to “Joe Blow Plumbing”, then your pages will not 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) on 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 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 have your visitors reading between the lines to find 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 at the quest game
That makes it important to anticipate what keywords and keyword phrases people will use when searching for your product or service, and then use those exact terms in the text on 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 your page text.
It’s not magic. It’s common sense. If a page has a lot of content focused on a specific keyword, it will generally score well for that term.
