Keyword

Keyword

Keyword - A keyword is a word or phrase that is entered by visitors in search engine queries. Choice of keywords and expression of the keywords in Web pages and links is the heart of search engine optimization. Examples of keywords can include: Washington, George Washington, People are funny, Tell me where to buy an iPOD or any other frequent word combination used in searches.

How search engines treat keywords

A phrase is treated more or less as separate words unless it is put in quotes, but search engines may try to find and list phrases that match the input text exactly. If the phrase is not in quotes, the search engine may ignore common words called stopwords.

The order of the wording generally makes a difference in retrieval of phrases. This should obviously be true for phrases like Old Black Joe as opposed to Old Joe Black but it is less obvious for Middle East Peace versus Peace in the Middle East.

Long Tail Keywords

Long phrases or combinations of words are called the "long tail" of search engine queries. While a single popular word such as Sex will get far more queries, far more combination phrases such as Sex and the City or Sex Arabs and Google exist, and some of them are surprisingly popular. These phrases are indexed as well, using Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to find frequent combinations. A Web page should usually be optimized for a single keyword, or at most two keywords or phrases.

Variations on a Keyword

Different variations of a keyword may produce different results in different search engines, though at least some search engines supposedly use "stemming" to enable them to retrieve for example, different tenses of the same verb. You can see for yourself that Recognized and Recognizing will each cause Google or Yahoo! to display totally different results. Plural forms do not give the same results as singular forms - Dog and Dogs give different results in Google and Yahoo.

However, it does seem that most search engines are NOT (very) case sensitive - Dog and dog will display the same results. Windows and windows will, curiously enough, display similar results apparently and so will Bill (name) and bill (law or invoice). (See the discussion of the Search Engines are case sensitive superstition). There ARE slight differences in searches in Google for George Washington and george washington and other combinations. This was true in 2006 (see here) and I have verified it. However these differences seem to be only in related links displays and other materials that may originate at Google. This was the difference for George Washington in the first page of links returned (first 10) - only evident in the related links displayed at the bottom:

Google search for George Washington keyword:

Search for george washington keyword:

Keywords and SEO

Search Engine optimization is based on targeting particular keywords, both in the text of the pages (on page SEO) and in links targeting the Web site or Web page.

Finding the right keyword

Finding the right keyword or keywords depends on

What business or field you are in
Size of the Web site
Number of Web sites that already use different keywords
Frequency of searches for different keywords
Locale

Keywords and your business or field

If you are in the widget business, and your Web page is about widgets, then your keywords and phrases should usually have the word "widget" or "widgets" in them.

Size of the Web site and keyword choice

You're going to have a great Web site, but you can't make it very big. As there are 122 million listings for widget in Google. you would probably need a large Web site and many years to get to the top of the listings for widget. This is especially true because the Web sites in the top positions are Wikipedia, Yahoo!, Apple and similar large and well established sites.

Your niche - Popularity and Frequency of Keyword

In order to be noticed among those millions of pages and huge Web sites, you will need to find your niche by finding a keyword that is relatively less popular than Widgets. Free Blog Widgets returns "only" about 13 million pages in Google. But a search in a keyword suggestion tool like the one provided by Google adsense at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal shows that nobody is searching for Free Blog Widgets evidently. Free widget got 8,100 searches on average according to Google. blog widget and blogger widgets each got 3,600 searches. Download widgets got 4,400 searches. Which is the best one to focus on?

Let's see:

Keyword	Searches	# of pages retrieved
Free widget	8,100	3,680,000
blog widget	3,600	50,100,000
blogger widgets	3,600	7,230,000
download widgets	4,400	3,200,000

From the above it is obvious that the best keyword in general for your site is "free widget" because it got the most searches relative to the number of pages with that keyword on the Web. But it might not be the best keyword for that page, since you might have another page that has links to pages with many types of widgets - all downloadable. This is a page about blog widgets. But there are 50 million blog widget pages. You may never get to the top of that keyword listing in any search engines. But wait - blogger widgets gets the same number of searcher, but there are "only" 7,230,000 pages. That might be a good choice. It will also ensure the highest conversion ratio - the people who will come to your site will be looking for blogger widgets and are more likely to download the "free" demonstration software, and then buy the actual product, than are people who would be attracted by free widgets or download widgets.

Locale and Keyword Choice

Google may show different results in different locales. If your site is in the UK and most of the links and pages to your site come from the UK, search engine results for keyword Widgets may be different than they are in the United States, and the relative keyword frequencies might be different. This is true even though your business, widgets, doesn't depend on a store location. Since 2007, you can also use the Google Webmaster tool to change the locale that Google records for your Web site, provided that the domain does not have a country ending such as .uk or .il or .tv .