Understanding and using keywords

Written on the 4 December 2012 by Snap Marketing

When it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), keywords are big business.

Essentially, keywords are the words and phrases that you would expect someone to type into a search engine when looking for your business offerings online. Search engines then return search results in response to those keywords, suggesting webpages that feature those same words and phrases to help browsers find what theyre looking for.

Why keywords count

Keywords can make or break the visibility of your businesss website. They are crucial to get your business to appear in search engine results and to increase your search engine rankings. By strategically placing keywords throughout your website, you can not only improve your online ranking, but also attract the right clients to your website.

Choosing the right keywords

The best keywords are highly relevant to your business, have relatively little competition from other websites and get searched frequently. This is an extremely delicate balancing act. The broad general terms that describe your business will no doubt describe many other businesses from around the world that have a website too. So think about the most relevant specific phrases that describe your business offerings. Consider: Do you have a specialty? Do you operate in a specific location? Does your business have a unique point of difference?

Helpful online tools

These great tools can help you research and identify strong keywords for your business:

Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics can help you understand where your web traffic is currently coming from and what search terms are driving it.
Keyword tools such as Google AdWords help you conduct keyword research to give you ideas for keywords, provide information on how fierce the competition is and provide statistics around how many people search those words or phrases.

Making keywords work for you

Create or adjust your webpages to work around the keywords you identify for your business. But beware: while adding keywords to your website works to increase your search rankings, overuse of keywords can cause search engines to penalise or block your website from results.

As well as using keywords and variations in the main website copy, to achieve the best results, integrate keywords into a combination of areas such as the: