SEO Tips & Information

Firstly, in relation to a website, what are Keywords?

Keywords are the words and phrases you write on a web page in an attempt to match the words and phrases people type into a search engine such as Google.

For example, if someone is looking for a holiday, and they search for “holidays”, the search engine will display results containing sites that mention holidays. The only way search engines will know whether a web page contains information about holidays is if the page contains text mentioning holidays.

Factors to consider when choosing Keywords

There are a number of factors in choosing keywords:-

• The keywords should describe the products or services you offer.
• The keywords should be ones for which people actually search.
• Hopefully, the keywords are ones people search for a lot.
• Hopefully the keywords are competitive, i.e. they are not too common.

These factors conflict. For example, if you are a travel agent you might choose holiday as a keyword because you sell holidays and lots of people will search for holidays. However, there will be so many web pages containing the word holiday that you will unlikely to appear high in any search results.

With a little more thought, you might instead choose a few more specific terms:

• greek holiday specialist
• travel agent worcester
• discount package holidays
• last minute package holdays
• adventure holidays in france

Build up a list of keywords and phrases you think people will type into search engines then include these in the text of your web pages. The best way to include the words is in a way that seems natural to the human reader.

Do not attempt to include lists of keywords for the sake of search engine matches. Try to build the text into the natural flow of the page.

In particular, do not attempt to include extra keywords by hiding the text, e.g. by making the text colour the same as the background. Such tricks can be spotted by search engines and may result in a penalty.

So far you might think:

What’s the fuss, if I’m a travel agent of course I’m going to include phrases like “adventure holidays in France”. I don’t need to think too much about keywords, I simply write about my products.

and you would be right, except that there are ways to highlight your keywords to search engines and potentially raise your pages up the search results. If one website is optimised to reinforce a certain keyword and your site is not then the odds are you will appear lower in the search results (However - see Google PageRank).

admin Keywords