SEO Essentials: What You Must Know About Keywords

Keywords are always talked about when people want to get SEO, or search engine optimization done. That's why you need to understand how to use them and what they really mean.

First of all, what is a keyword? 

A keyword is the word or words that someone would type into a search engine search box. For instance, if someone wanted to find out about the nearest pet store, they would likely type into the box "pet store" along with their zip code. People enter in thousands of keywords a day, so there are always a few keywords for any topic you might be involved with.

Why keywords are important ?

The reason that these keywords are important, is that the search engines send out crawlers or spiders to find them in websites around the Internet. These "spiders" or "crawlers" are merely bits of code that the search engines use to figure out which sites are relevant to certain keywords.


The more relevant a site is to a keyword, according to the search engine's algorithm, the higher the site will be in the search engine's results pages. Keywords are just one piece of this algorithm, but they are an important piece.


Therefore, if you want to work on improving your site's rank in the search engine listings, you need to work on incorporating keywords into your website content. This can be done fairly easily, once you know which keywords you want to use, and come up with quality content to put on your site.

How do you know which keywords to use? 

You can use your common sense. For example, if you want to sell pencils, the keyword dogs may not be a good one to use. There are some keyword research tools out there which can help you figure out some more creative keywords to use. The tools can also help you know what people are actively searching for.


Once you have the keywords you want to use, you have to create the content of your site. Or, if you have good keywords, you can just insert them into the content you've already written. The key is to make your content natural and keyword rich. Some beginners tend to do "keyword stuffing", which basically means making content unintelligible by adding nothing but keywords. Remember, people have to read your content too.

Content is not the only place you can use keywords. 

You can also include keywords in your site's meta-tags, and you can also make sure that you label all your pictures using keywords. After all, people do image searches as well, and you can sometimes place higher in those results because a lot of people don't realize that picture titles are also indexed by the search engines.



Finding out about keywords is an essential part of good SEO. Without them, you are not going to be able to mount an effective SEO campaign. Luckily, after reading this article, you should be able to better understand how good keywords can help you and bring you the traffic you want.