About Keywords and Search Engine Optimization

In an earlier post (What is Search Engine Optimization) I introduced the importance of keywords to Search Engine Optimization. As given there, we define keywords as:

One or more words entered into a search engine by a user. The keywords are used by the search engine to provide the user with relevant results based on the specific word or phrase as typed in by the user.

For SEO purposes a “keyword” can be one or more words. Keywords are objective, meaning they are the actual words being typed into a search engine by a user (searcher). We find when talking to our audience of small business owners and professionals that what they think their keywords are most often is incorrect. In other words, their guess as to what people are typing into their browsers to search for their product or service is NOT what users are actually typing in.

If we took the keywords they originally gave us and used these to optimize their website, the results—while perhaps better than nothing—would be very unsatisfactory.

And that’s why a thorough, professional keyword analysis is the critical first step to any SEO work.

What are Keywords?

When thinking about keywords and SEO it’s helpful to track the process backwards — from the searcher to the search engine to the optimization. Everything is centered around the searcher. As explained above, the words he or she types into the search engine are the keywords.

These keywords are submitted to the search engine which then — using is own “secret formula” — processes the request and sends back to the searcher a list of all the items that the search engine’s technology believes to be the most relevant to that search request. These results are ranked by the search engine with that item deemed most important put at the top of the page followed by the rest in descending order of importance.

The service being provided by the search engine is to give searchers a set of results from their search that is as close as possible to what they are actually looking for. The search engines that do this well become the most popular. I believe it’s important to understand that the search engine’s are trying to serve the searchers, NOT the websites that are trying to be found.

Why is the Keyword Analysis So Important?

Since this process is searcher-centric the keywords are WHAT THE SEARCHERS ARE USING, not what we might think they should be. Further, each keyword can be phrased in different ways. For example, let’s say you have a car repair shop located in St. Louis, MO. Here’s some possible keywords a searcher in St. Louis might use to find a car repair shop:

• auto repair St. Louis MO
• St. Louis MO auto repair
• car repair St. Louis MO
• St. Louis MO car repair

In SEO parlance these are four different keywords. Even though conceptually it’s clear what the searcher is looking for, these keywords produce very different results in Google!

St. Louis MO auto repair = 4,700,000 items found

auto repair St. Louis MO = 568,000 items found

I think this demonstrates the importance of figuring out the correct keywords for your website to use. The way to determine the correct keywords is called the Keyword Analysis. It’s the first step in any professional search engine optimization project. Any given website may have scores of valid keywords, and might have hundreds of “conceptually correct” keywords that are of no value in search engine optimization.

There are various  tools available that allow us to research what keywords are being used by searches. The process to  evaluate those keywords and develop the set of the most viable keywords for a given site is as much an art as a science — and that is beyond the scope of this article.

Our company, GreatCircle Studios, offers a number of different SEO services. Each one starts with a keyword analysis (except for the free evaluation). Call us if you wish to learn more.

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