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Key Words and Search Terms

For all search engine marketing efforts, the first stage will involve defining the keywords that you wish to target. Keywords are words that tell the search engine what your website is about. The keywords are going to be those words that your prospect is using to look for you.

When a person uses a search engine, the actual words that they enter are called the search-term. For example, when some one types in the words: ‘sports shoes’; that is the search term. If you have designed your website to explicitly target the words ‘sports shoes’ then it is more likely that your site will be given a prominent listing (because the search engine will deem it to be relevant to the enquiry at hand).

On the other hand though, if your website had been optimised to target the words ‘running shoes’, then your keywords and the search-term may not be as good a match. Accordingly the chances are that your website would be deemed less relevant and be given a lower ranking in the results listing.

Clearly it’s important to choose the best keywords to target and incorporate into your website. Keywords are incorporated throughout a web page. They should be found in both the body (main) text of a page, and in the html tags and carefully in META tags as well.
 

A website can even incorporate several keywords (keyword themes) on a single page (or often more appropriately spread across several pages). Often the search engine will gauge the relevance of any chosen keywords based upon the frequency with which they appear on a page. This is often called the keyword-density.

For example if you only have 20 words on a page and 2 of them are ‘sports shoes’ then the keyword density would be 10%. (Note: Search Engines often do not count words common words like ‘the’, ‘and’ and ‘is’ as words for the purposes of processing a page’s relevancy. Different search engines often have a certain range of key-word density that they find optimal.

Note: Think twice before using any sort of Brand Name in your actual keywords... people have gotten in trouble for using the brand names of other companies in their keywords without permission.

For Google or Yahoo expect to keep your keyword density to around 3-5%. If you deliberately squeeze in too many keywords, you run the risk of being penalised if the search engines think you are 'spamming' or 'spamdexing'.

Also, the latest, post-November 2003 advice that is being given from many of the top search engine research firms has been to take care not to trigger the so-called 'Over Optimisation Penalty'. In regards to our keywords the advice is not be too regular with your keywords. In other words, do not repeat them too many times or in the exact same order. - Vary the order and insert addition words in between the keywords.

This is especially important if the linking text and your title tag already contain your keywords. If you have the exact keyword pharse, in the exact same order (especially near the top of your page) repeated again, it can be too easy for google to decide that your page is 'trying too hard' to target a specific term... and therefore consider your content to be spam.

The main idea is to still have your site revolve are the keywords in the right amounts, but not to be too zealous or compulsive in the use of a specific term.

Also note, that for some longer search terms, Google may sometimes look for websites that match separate parts of the search term. For example a search for North Sydney Shoe Shops, may return results that weighted more strongly for 'North Sydney' and separately results for 'shoe shops'. So the trick is to design a content rich site that also matches for 'broad' content.

Side note: That Google and Yahoo are/will be focusing more on local or regional searches (as competition to the regular yellow pages perhaps). So you can expect more actual local/regional/geographically based results, when searching for a local business etc. as of 18th May 2004, their local results are still in BETA mode... but expect this to change as the year moves on.

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SEM Advantage (SPS Group Pty Ltd)

Suite 207, 410 Elizabeth Street,

Surry Hills, NSW 2010, Australia

p 61 2 9280 0010

f  61 2 9280 0081

e simon@iedsolutions.com.au

Copyright (C) 2003 SPS Group Pty Ltd. No Reproduction permitted