Every book, manual, article, or Website on the subject of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) goes into a lot of detail about the importance of keywords and how search engines might analyze a web page for them. Not so very long ago it was a simple matter of getting your page meta-tags right to please the search engines, but nowadays things are a bit more complicated...
Studying the subject of 'on page optimization' will usually reveal how vital it is to have your keywords in URLs, page titles, page headings, outbound links, internal links, alt image descriptions, bold text, italic text, anchor text, etc etc etc. There needs to be enough keyword weight on the page, but not too much or you run the risk of overcooking the page and being penalized by search engines for keyword spamming, and so on, and so on.
Keyword usage and density can often become the be all and end all for webmasters trying to navigate the tricky river of SEO and find a route to the kingdom of website heaven – possibly even to the detriment of the actual users of the site. In fact, the worst case scenario is a website that hasn’t been built for human readers at all, but is merely the latest all powerful technique of the unscrupulous Internet Marketer, seeking clicks on the page to generate advertising revenue. The site offers no value, except for a paid link to a site that may or may not be what the reader was looking for in the first place.
With this never ending battle for supremacy in the search engine rankings it is easy to get bogged down by the intricacies of SEO and lose track of the basic reason we are focusing our attention on keywords in the first place. The reason is of course that we are anticipating the words and phrases people will use to find our website using a search engine. Smart website developers will painstakingly research the ‘right’ keywords long before designing the pages; usually with the help of keyword research tools to aid the process. The resulting free traffic that arrives at a site's pages as a result of good keyword research is well worth the investment in time and effort.
But it should not be overlooked that nowadays the search engine algorithm is so powerful that it can instantly recognize many of the ploys used by keyword spammers and unscrupulous Internet Marketers and automatically pass over these spam sites in favour of another more worthy and content-rich offering.
The conclusion is that if you are intent on building a quality Website for human visitors and getting targeted traffic, then be careful of using techniques that may have worked very well a year or two ago, because you just might be penalized because of them. Of course, it would be foolish to overlook the importance of keywords when developing a website; but use some common sense and make them a part of the content – not the content itself.
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