Keywords are the foundations that search engines use to rank websites when returning search results. They are the words that are most relevant to a companies or person’s website and in terms of search engine optimisation are the words and phrases that internet users are most likely to type into search engines to find relevant websites.
Primarily, keywords should be used (in moderation) in the content of the website, meta data and the anchor text for links.
A general rule of thumb is that for each page of content, the keyword density should be approximately 5 to 7% – fewer than this and the search engines will fail to recognise this as a notable keyword, more than this and they may consider it to be keyword stuffing, a black hat technique. When writing content for a website the fundamental rule to remember is that it will be read by humans who will then decide to purchase the product or service on offer. Therefore, liberally using keywords out of context may be appealing to the search engine robots reading the text, however if this content is not readable for humans then they will quickly click back to the search results and find another website.
Another area onsite that keywords should be used is in the meta tags. They definitely need to be prominent in the title and page description, however there is an ongoing dispute about the importance that they have in the keyword field and whether they have any SEO value. Originally, this field was introduced so that webmasters could tell the search engines what content their websites contained and then rank them based on this. However, with the rapid expansion of the Internet and webmasters taking advantage of this, the search engines needed to implement alternative algorithms which gave less weighting to the keyword tag.
Google states that they no longer use this tag to rank websites and so many webmasters, rightly or wrongly believe that there is no point in including this information to their web pages. However, our understanding is that although this may be the case, it is good practice to include them when building or modifying a website as it will back up the content that has been written on the specific webpage, in turn increasing the relevancy of the page. Another reason to include them is that although Google says that they don’t use the meta keywords, other search engines do take them into account. Despite Google having the majority market share of the search engines market, internet users still use these other websites and not having the keywords in place could be the difference between a click through to the website or not. Finally, search engine algorithms are forever changing and what’s to say that tomorrow Google could give the keyword meta tag a far greater weighting in ranking websites?
But how do you know which keywords to use?
There are a number of tools available on the internet that allow webmasters to research their market and analyse which keywords people are using to find their website.
Google Keyword Tool is one such example, it allows for a few keywords to be entered into the search box and it will return “related” keywords, along with their search frequency. Although this is primarily used for creating AdWords (PPC) accounts, it can be a handy SEO tool too. For those with established websites, Google Analytics can provide webmasters with a helpful insight with which keywords their website is being found for, and of these which ones internet users are most likely to click through to the website. But a simple search in any of the search engines will return a plethora of keyword tools available on the internet.
Keywords are fundamental to an SEO campaign, get them right and the results will be positive, get them wrong and it could be disasterous! The keyword to remember in SEO is moderation – don’t be too liberal using your keywords but at the same time include them wherever possible.
