SEO: The Art of the Keyword

The ability to bring traffic to a site is important for the success of the site. Unless the site is solely for personal or family use, the reason someone creates a site is to bring people to it. Sometimes it for the sale of a product, sometimes it is for the sale of advertising revenue, or sometimes just for the want of popularity. The art of driving people to a site is largely accomplished through the use of search engine keywords.

The Keyword is King!

The keyword is king because keywords relate to the words and the phrases that people type into the search engines when they are trying to find something. When they want to search for a “Han Dynasty oil lamp” they will probably just type it in and find it pretty quickly since there are not that many of this type of oil lamp around. But if on the other hand, they typed in just oil lamp they are going to be presented with around five million entries.

The person who is searching for the oil lamp is not going to go through all five million entries to find just the lamp that they want. Any site that is at the top of this generic search list is either a well-known site like say Amazon, a site that is not going to provide the searcher with what they want such as how to make your own oil lamp or an established site who has learned the art of the keyword.

How does the keyword relate?

If the site in question is in the business of selling oil lamps, there are a number of things that can be done to optimize for keywords. One of the first is to purchase a domain name with the keyword in it. This is not always possible so the aim is to get something close to the keyword or unique enough that the searcher may type it in when looking for their product.

The next thing is to come up with a list of more focused phrases like “Kerosene oil lamp”, “Aladdin oil lamps”, “oil lamp replacement parts”, etc. It is best to keep a running list of these terms that can be used whenever updating the site so as to add them to the content on an ongoing basis. The other place that these should be entered into is within the HTML of the head portion of the web page in the Meta description and the Meta keywords section.

Why the search engines optimize for keywords?

The reason that search engines focus on keywords is that is what makes them successful. If every time someone sat down and typed in an oil lamp and all it retrieved was electric lamps or oil pumps, that search engine would not find itself with very many users and it would soon be out of business. So sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing constantly work at becoming more efficient at determining what people are searching for and helping them find it.

Because of this, the site owner must be vigilant with how they rank on each of the search engines requests and monitor deviations and changes that can occur. The ability to refine and narrow the focus so that through the use of proper keywords more targeted search can lead to the site being listed at the top of the page.

It’s All About Targeting the Customer

When driving traffic to a site the keyword is king, but it is all about targeting what the customer is looking for and how they will find it within a search engine. By getting into the mind of the searcher and analyzing how they think and what they are looking for and targeting those keywords traffic will be flowing to the site.