What Are Keywords? And Why Should You Bother Finding The Best Keywords For Your Website?
Keywords are the lifeline of your website or blog. Yes, they're THAT important.
Sure there are other methods you could use to drive traffic to your website, but if you can get free traffic simply by understanding how this keywords "thing" works, why wouldn't you want to make full use of it?
OK so what are keywords?
To put it simply, keywords are the words and phrases that people will use to find your website or blog. That’s why it's extremely important to figure out what they are.
Let me explain further with an example.
Let’s assume that Bill and Jane are going on a vacation to Paris. What’s one of the most important things that they'll need when they go on a vacation? Some sort of accommodation right?
So Jane starts doing some research online to get more information on hotels in Paris. She goes to Google (or any of the other major search engines) and types in “paris hotels”. Paris hotels is therefore a keyword phrase.
Keywords can be made up of one word (e.g. Paris) or more.
The more generic the keyword phrase is, the harder it will be for you to rank on page 1 of Google.
So for example, if you’re trying to rank for the keyword “Paris” you can forget about it. Why? Because there are already way too many established websites with information on Paris out there and they’re all competing for the top spot!
So the “trick” with keywords is to identify those words that have high demand (that is a lot of people are using these words when they’re doing a Google search) but have low supply (meaning that not a lot of websites have optimized their pages for these particular keywords).
There are many keyword optimization tools that can help you find good keywords for your niche. (I will be reviewing the main ones that I use in the near future, so make sure to sign up for my free updates below, and you'll be the first to know when I publish these review articles).
What are long tail keywords?
Long tail keywords are keyword phrases that contain more than two words. So these types of keyword phrases usually have anything from three to five or more words.
So in the paris hotels example I mentioned previously, related long tail keywords might be “cheap hotels in paris”, or “top 4 star hotels in paris”. Get the idea?
The beauty of long tail keywords is that although they have less demand (that is less people are typing “top 4 star hotels in paris” than “paris hotels”) they usually provide much more TARGETED traffic to your website or blog.
Targeted traffic is what you really want. Because targeted traffic is what converts the best!
Taking the paris hotels example again. People who use the keyword phrase “paris hotels” may only be doing some light research at that point, so they’re just browsing through information on hotels that they can book in Paris. It doesn’t essentially mean that they’re ready to book yet.
However, someone who types in “top 4 star hotels in Paris” is likely to be much more targeted, because he already knows that he wants a 4 star hotel! He most likely would have already done some research on 4 star hotels in Paris. So he’s now looking for the best ones and as soon as he determines which 4 star hotel is the best one for his needs, he’s going to make his reservation!
So if you had a website or blog on Paris vacations and you optimized a page on the “top 4 star hotels in Paris” you will definitely attract much more targeted visitors than if you attempted to rank for “paris hotels”.
See the difference?
So when choosing a keyword, always try to figure out what the searchers' intent is. What are they actually looking for? Provide a great solution for that and you'll hit the jackpot.
Return from What Are Keywords? to SEO Web Marketing main section
Return from What Are Keywords? to Web Traffic Zebra home page
