For improved search engine ranking, understanding keywords is absolutely essential. This article will explore what keywords are, what to do with them and why you should care in general.

What is a keyword anyway?

A keyword is any search term you enter into a search engine to find the information you are after. It can be composed of anything from one word to many words. Every word of this web page is technically a keyword. Having said that though, most search engines will limit searches to nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc... and leave out prepositions like 'the', 'from', 'on', 'a' and the like. These words occur so often in the english language that to search for them alone would be meaningless.

Good keywords versus Bad keywords

A good keyword is one that your ideal visitor is likely to enter into a search engine to find what you have to offer. A bad keyword is everything else. If you have a website, every page of that website has keywords in it. Which keywords search engines will pick up however, and give you good ranking on, is a matter of science.

What is the main focus of your website?

Too many web site owners write the content of their web pages with absolutely no regard for their ability to rank well in the search engines. This is a mistake. Focus on making the purpose of your site obvious to your website visitors and you'll have taken a giant step towards choosing the right keywords for your site. If your website sells sports apparel, how useful would it be to focus your keyword optimization efforts on a keyword like 'baby names'? Not very. In a less extreme case, failing to plan which keywords will be your main focus on your page is also insane. If you do not write your web site pages with particular keywords in mind, don't be surprised if you don't rank well in any search engines.

Choose one keyword combination per page to focus on

As you get into keyword research, you come to realize that there are a whole lot of ways to say the same thing. With millions of people doing searches online, pretty much every possible combination of keywords will be entered in for a given topic at any given time on a search engine. A mistake I see many people making is trying to focus their page on a number of keyword combinations that relate to their product or service all on the same page. While being able to rank on multiple keyword combinations is possible, it is rarely successful. One big reason is keyword density. There is so much more I can say on keyword research. Improved search engine rankings are certainly possible as you learn how to harness your keyword potential in the right direction.