What are keywords and why are they important?

SEO is, in short, all about the keywords. Users type them into search engines in order to find the best site based on that search, therefore, keywords are the food of search engines. So it's vital to match your keywords to your content and your content to your keywords. Skillful, accurate choosing and placement of keywords and building of your content to provide as much information to users seeking information based on those keywords is at the root of successful search engine ranking. Keep in mind that search engine sophistication grows at an exponential rate. Poorly or lazily chosen keywords or a mismatch between keywords and content can not only lower your rankings but can potentially be penalized as an attempt attempt to mislead users and search engines.

Note that the term "keywords" refers to either single words or strings of words used to describe a single type of search, called a "key phrase." In fact, it is far more likely that a keyword will actually be multiple words. In the interest of brevity, however, keywords will hereafter refer to both cases of single words and key phrases.

Your goal is to choose a single best keyword — again, we're talking about a key phrase, in all likelihood — for each page but you'll have the opportunity to include probably iterations of that keyword. Consider including plurals of the keyword and reordering the words in key phrase.

How to choose keywords

When choosing keywords for a page, you must think like a user who doesn't already know you or your organization and who is entering information a search engine to find services an organization LIKE yours or services LIKE the ones you provide. It's worth clarifying that many organizations will believe that hammering away at their company name is the best strategy but a user who already knows your name will also likely know your url and, therefore, will not be searching for it.

When choosing keywords, try to be as specific as possible. This helps avoid choosing keywords that are too broad or too much in competition.

Shotgunning Keyword

The goal in the past used to be to choose one primary keyword and place it and it alone in page title, headlines, subheads, and paragraph blocks. Back then, if you included other related words — words commonly used whenever your main topic is discussed — so be it. It was believe that it had no affect on SERPs. Recently, however, it has been proven that by simply creating honest and complete content about a subject achieves far more than spamming a single keyword.

The instances of those keywords related to your main topic are now picked up by major search engines and serve as further proof that a user has probably arrived at the correct page, thus raising search engine ranking.

Furthermore, building informative, optimized pages from those related keywords and linking back and forth between them and the main topic page will create a group of similar themed pages, letting the search engine know that not only do you cover a single topic, but many aspects of that topic, again raising your search engine ranking.

Tools to help you find keywords

There are a number of pay tools to help you identify, narrow down and choose keywords appropriate for your pages, however, we suggest a tool called Übersuggest which give to you free the most important function that many of these pay products offer, a keyword selection tool that is on par or better than its free counterparts.

Organic versus Paid

You will experience no shortage of invitations, e- and snail mail, to assist you with SEO and its sister skill set SEM, discussed in the Building Links section. Differentiating real outfits and services from spam and scam is a near impossible task for any but the most experienced website owner. For this reason, it is beneficial to know how to accomplish as much of your own SEO as possible. Barring that, it is necessary to at least to know which questions to ask to determine your true needs.

111 Web Studio is here to serve as your honest consultant in these matters. We operate on the highest level of ethics and only bill for work done. It is our constant policy not to nickel and dime users for information that a knowlegable friend might give.

Adding keywords via Church111

The Church111 admin interface allows an unlimited number of admin users that you authorize, at any of a number of levels access from page-level to full administrative control, to affect changes to individual pages, including their SEO related elements. Control your page HTML page title, your META keywords and description. Add keywords to headlines, subheads, paragraph text and image alt fields. Create links and lists to related content to create groups of like-themed pages and more. Add Google and Bing! global verification code and a global Google Analytics code snippet. Enjoy this deep level of control using the intuitive, powerful admin interface that literal thousands of users have enjoyed since the beginning of the century.

Now that you have a solid understanding of keywords, the building blocks of SEO, proceed to Creating quality page content.