Understanding Keywords and Using Them To Your Advantage

Chances are if you've chosen to read this article you already know about the value of keywords and how they help search engines find your site.The keywords you ultimately choose to build your site around can play a big part in whether or not your pages come up in searches... at a reasonable rank! Generally, you won't find much impact on your site traffic if your key pages are coming up on say the tenth page of search results. At the same time, if your pages have an obscure keyword and you're coming up on the first, and only page of search results you might be just as disappointed.Choosing the right keyword(s) to build your website around has as much to do about strategic choices as planning for bringing a new product into an unknown market.SUPPLY AND DEMANDIt's easy to determine a popular keyword... something you can do almost without thinking. For example you know there are thousands of folks searching for digital cameras at any one time so a decision to build around that keyword is almost a no-brainer, or so it would seem.While there are certainly enough folks looking for your digital cameras did you know that there are millions of possible destinations a visitor could go to all of which comprise the results of that simple "digital cameras" search? So herein lies the old equation of supply and demand. Keywords, like everything else to be brought into the marketplace, will better serve you when viewed in the supply and demand model. You've got to find a niche for yourself - perhaps building on "compact digital cameras" or "digital slr cameras," something small enough to yield a realistic chance of making it to the first few pages of search results - so you get some traffic vs. no traffic.In time, as your site grows in content, in-pointing links, and other attributes that search engines seek out you can think more about going for the heavy keywords... like tackling "digital cameras" again!SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZED CONTENTWriting for search engines is a bit different from writing for people... but with a bit of practice you can develop a style that is suitable for both. Search engines like to see your keyword(s) sprinkled throughout your content, not too little and not too much. If you can incorporate your keyword in your page filename, the title, and in different spots in the body text of your page you've got a pretty good chance that the search engines will notice it. Add to that some links on the page that include your keyword... like a link to the top of your page, and you've increased your chances a for search engine recognition a bit more.When setting up outside links to your site, it's always good to incorporate the keyword as the hypertext so the search engines see your keywords in links directed to your page.Paying attention to your keywords and knowing how and when to use them can give your pages a significant boost in the search engines but remember to temper all of this with your page's ability to hold the visitor's interest otherwise the value of having folks visit your site is instantly lost when they find your site uninteresting and inevitably click away never to return!