What is a relevant keyword phrase?
A relevant keyword is a word or phrase that singularly describes, or as closely describes, the topic of your web page as possible. Put another way, someone should be able to look at your keyword phrase and know what your web page is about.
Its been common knowledge, in the webmasters world, for years that selecting the most relevant keywords is one of, if not the most, important steps in preparing you web site for search engines. After all, it's the only way for people to find us on the Internet.
We all know what a search engine is and how to use them, but do we actually know how they work? Knowing what a search engine does and how it works will better show the importance of keywords.
Search engines have robots that continuously crawl the Internet indexing new web pages and re indexing (updating) older pages. The first thing that a robot does, in relation to keywords when it visits your site, is read your robots.txt file for permission to crawl your site. Once the bot has permission it index's (archives) the title of your page, the keyword and description meta tags and the header tags in your content. The search engine uses this information to determine what search terms apply and are most relevant to your web page.
A web site is merely a group of web pages and each web page in your web site should have it's own set of unique keywords. Be sure to include, if at all possible, your most relevant keyword phrase in the title of each page and in the anchor text of links to that page. This will work wonders in getting your page listed and also ranking.
Now that we know what a keyword is and how search engines use them we next need to know how to select the relevant keywords for our web page. The best way to do that would be to select a keyword as an example. Lets say that you have a web page about cameras, the obvious word for that page would be "camera". The problem here is that the word "camera" is to broad of a keyword. so you have to get more specific.
- If you type the word camera into a search engine it returns 443,000,000 pages with the word camera in their content.
- But, if we type in the keyword phrase "digital camera" the results drop to 207,000,000. That has already cut the competition in half.
- So we refine the keyword phrase even more and type in the words "cheap digital camera" and the results drop even more to 9,150,000.
- Next, we experiment a little, and try a different phrase "affordable digital camera" and the results are even better with 1,980,000.
It's always best to use a keyword phrase rather than a single keyword to describe your web site. Think about it. A phrase of two or three words will describe the content of your web page much more accurately than a single word.
Refining your keywords is fundamental to creating your web site, but, its only one step in the quest for a top ranking. Lets face it, their's always going to be other digital camera web sites.
Daryl is the creator of the popular web site Web Essentials and other web based educational Internet sites. He is also the author of numerous authoritative articles on web design and development topics. To learn more about web development visit Web Essentials at http://www.pro-dezign.com/
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