Keywords are the words that can stand alone and describe your company to someone who has never heard about you before; these are the words your target audience type into the search-field on Yahoo! and Google when searching for companies doing what your company does.
When creating web content the main focus is writing engaging text which delivers your message to the visitors. However, in order to even read your text the visitors first have to find your website. They do that either through your costly advertisements (online or offline) or by finding your website on their own in search engines at no cost to you.
One of your most important, most effective and cheapest means of online advertising is to simply be findable to those who are looking for what you offer. How do you do that? The trick is to have the search engines associate your website with the keywords your potential customers are searching for.
There are essentially two ways to keyword-optimize your website
- One is called on-site search engine optimization (abbreviated SEO), and means to optimize the text on your website by making sure your keywords appear through-out the text in key location like the website title, headlines and link
- The other is called off-site search engine optimization – or search engine marketing (abbreviated SEM). This means to have other websites link to your website using your selected keywords as the link-text. So when a website has a link like this: web design, search engines view it as a vote for the target website in the category “web design”. The more votes, the higher position in the search results when someone searches for “web design”.
This way keyword-optimizing your web content increases your websites findability greatly.
How do I choose the right keywords?
The main thing to remember when determining your company’s keywords is to keep the focus on your target group. Your keywords should be your target group’s keywords. This means that whatever words your target audience type into a search engine to find your products, these are the most important words to have on your website.
You can do keyword research yourself. Ask members of your target group. Search Google yourself to find out what keywords your competitors are using? Maybe all your competitors are focusing on the same keywords. Maybe there are synonyms for those keywords with lower competition. This could be an easy way to get a good position in the search engine result pages. An important tool when keyword-optimizing text is measuring the “keyword density”. Keyword density means the frequency of specific keywords in a text. For example: the word “keywords” appears 14 times on this page. That means a keyword density of around 2%. In other words, 2% of the words on this web page is “keywords”. A high keyword density means that search engines will deem your website relevant for that keyword.
The more competition there is in your market, the more you will benefit from thorough keyword research. Contact us to learn more about how your web findability can benefit from keyword competition research and keyword-optimization.
Find related articles in Frequently Asked Questions, Search Engine Optimisation, Web content development.
