Keyword Search

What are keywords and keyword phrases?

Keywords and keyword phrases (often collectively referred to as keywords) are the words and phrases that people enter in search engine searches to find relevant web pages. Keyword identification is a key step in writing for the web and in online marketing.

What is keyword density and keyword optimization?

Keyword density is the number of times that keywords and keyword phrases are used compared to the rest of the text. For example, the previous sentence used keyword twice and keywords once. The term keyword density is also in the section heading. Keyword density is a factor in search engine ranking — but it's possible to overdo it.

With keyword optimization, you use a variety of keywords and keyword phrases repeatedly within the flow of the text and in headings. Keyword optimization increases the chances of search engines ranking your site high for your targeted keywords and keyword phrases.

How to search for and find relevant keywords

That's where the keyword analysis tool comes in. To identify keywords that people search for, type in keywords and keyword phrases that are relevant to your page content. The keyword identification tool will display Wordtracker and Overture results indicating how many times the word or phrase is searched for as well as the keywords in phrases that you might not have thought of. (Overture has higher numbers because its data is based on more searches, while Wordtracker has the advantage of differentiating between singular and plural forms.)

Once you've seen popular keyword phrases and popularity statistics, you can choose the best keywords and keyword phrases to optimize at your site.

How to choose keywords

After you've identified keywords relating to your content, look at how often the keywords are searched for each day. Don't look only at the top ones; look at the ones further down the keyword ranking list. You may have better success bringing in site visitors with keywords that fewer sites optimize for.

Include specific keyword phrases as well as the keywords themselves. If your business location is relevant, use the name of your city and province/state in the text. These words may not appear as keywords on keyword ranking lists, but location words are often used in searches.

Use keywords that are relevant to your content. The keywords you find may give you ideas about what to include in your content.

Where to use keywords

Search engines give a lot of weight to the text within these tags:

• In the <title> tag (see the article All About Title Tags for more information)
• In the <h1> tag

Other important places to use keywords:

• In other header tags: <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, etc.
• In link anchor text
• In lists
• Throughout the text (but not overdone) and especially in the first paragraph or two