What are Keywords for and why are they important?

When you begin to build your website you hear the word keyword quite often. I am sure you have asked, what are keywords for? Well I am going to explain to you what they are for, why they are important for your website search engine optimization (SEO), and where to effectively use them.

Knowing the answers to these three will greatly help your website content to get better rankings within the search engines. As I am sure you already know, the higher you rank in the search engines, meaning the closer you are to Page 1 in search results, the better off and more traffic (people) you will get coming to your website.

What are keywords used for?

First off let me explain the meaning of a keyword. Keywords are the words that people type into a search engine when looking for answers or solutions. Keywords are used to send targeted search traffic to your website. You can almost think of them as advertisements for your website SEO. When someone does a search on let us say Google for your keywords, Google will then display all content that it has indexed with those keywords in it to the person who is doing the search.

For example, you go up on Google and you want to know, when was West Point built? Google in a matter of about a half second will gather every web page and post that it has indexed about the history of West Point and it will display these pages in a most relevant order pertaining to the search query.

Why are keywords important to your SEO?

So if you want to drive the most traffic to your web page or post you want to make sure that you are using low competition keywords so that you can rank higher in the search results. What do I mean by low competition keywords? It means that less webmasters are targeting for that specific keyword or keyword phrase.

A low competition keyword is a bit more specific. For example if the keyword was “Running Shoes” that would be a keyword that many webmasters will more than likely use because it is very common. But if you used the keywords “Fila black and red running shoes” you are being more specific and more than likely the competition would be lower.

So if you can determine what the lowest competition keyword is that someone will type into a search engine for what you have to offer, then you will have mastered keyword research. Finding the right keyword will be very beneficial to your website SEO because the lower the competition, the more likely that your content will be seen higher in the search engine results page (SERP).

Why is being seen higher in the search results important? Think about your actions when you go up on any of the search engines for information. How often do you go past the first page of results on to pages 2 and beyond before you decide to click on a website? The majority of people do not go past page one, so the higher your page can rank, the better.

Where do I put the keywords for best SEO?

There are two areas that are important for where your keywords should be for the best SEO. The first and most important place is in the title of your page or post. If you are using a long tailed keyword, which is a keyword that has more than 3 words, sometimes it may seem difficult or not feasible to have it as your page title. In order to be able to include it, see the explanation on my Using Keywords page.

The second area that is important for your keyword to reside is ideally somewhere within the first paragraph, though it could be in the second paragraph depending on how your content is written. The one thing to remember is that your content needs to flow and sound natural where ever you put the keyword, it cannot sound like you “stuffed” the keyword into the content.

After placing the keyword into your first or second paragraph you should not use it again for the rest of the content on the page. If it does come up again within the conversation of the content and it comes up naturally, then that is okay as long as it does not happen often. Ideally your keyword should not appear more than twice within the content of the page.

How to find keywords.

There are many types of keyword research software tools you can purchase online that will do many things in addition to just giving you search results. They all basically do the same thing, just that some have more bells and whistles and cost different prices. However for the sake of this post I am going to be talking about the one I get to use for free with my membership to Wealthy Affiliate.

If you are interested in training and Internet Marketing opportunities such as what I enjoy at Wealthy Affiliate, you can get more information on The Wealthy Affiliate Review page. But as for how to find keywords let me continue with the keyword tool I use at Wealthy Affiliate that does what most other tools do.

In the picture above you will see a view of the keyword tool I use. I did a search for the keyword – best free website builder. The results I got back were pretty good. The current monthly searches are 10,517 and the monthly traffic is 1,788. Those are both good numbers because they show that many people are typing this keyword into the search engines every month.

However the most important number is that of the competition and that number should be below 300 if you should want to have a good enough chance to rise above the competition. Google claims 400 and below, I personally shoot for 300 and below. To find out the competition number for this keyword using this keyword tool, I need to click on View Results.

By clicking on “View Results” the keyword tool searches all of Google to display the monthly competition results. In the picture above you can see that this keyword has a low enough competition value of 184 per month. This would make a great keyword to create a page or post of content on.

This is why keywords are still important.

They say that “Content is King” and this is true. If you have great content and no real targeted keywords you still can get good rankings but the flip side is not true. If you have great keywords and not great content you will not rank well. But when you combine great content with great low competition keywords you have a winning combination.

Keywords will help to get you listed higher in the SERP but it is your content with the keywords that will get you traffic and ultimately conversions. So it is always in your best interest to find keywords that have monthly high searches and low competition. This will greatly benefit your website within the search results.

You should also check out my post on What is the Meta Description because this is another area where keywords play an important role in SEO. If you have any questions or comments about what you have just read, please leave them below. Also please share my content with those who can benefit from the knowledge by using the Social Media share and like buttons below.