What Are Kewords, Exactly and Which Ones Are Important?

Keywords and keyword phrases are the lifeblood of websites.

A keyword can be thought of as any word that a user types into a search engine. A keyword phrase can be thought of as any collection of words a user types into a search engine.

Which Keywords are Important

When someone types a keyword, lets say something related to “kona scuba diving”, into a search engine, they are normally looking for one of three things:

1. information about the keyword (dive spots in kona)
2. to purchase something related to the keyword (cheapest scuba diving in kona)
3. entertainment related to the keyword (pictures of scuba diving in kona)

Of these three types of searchers, we are most interested in the one looking to purchase something related to kona scuba diving. If we have what they want and they get to our page, we have a good chance of getting them to purchase it from us! A virtually effortless sale!

Axiom 1: Our most important keywords will be any keyword that has a
moderate probability of leading to a purchase.

Of these three types of searchers, after purchasers, we are next interested in those seeking information about the keyword, mostly because they may eventually become purchasers, either online or once they get to Hawaii (or wherever you are).

Axiom 2: Our second most important keywords will be those related to our product or service of interest to information seekers.

Lastly, we are still interested in the entertainment seekers. If we have what they are looking or, they may eventually purchase from us, or they may talk about our site in forum or on their log or they may LINK to our site. Links are so very important, and links to internal pages of our website are just as important as those to our home page (Google sees natural links to internal pages as a signal of quality, and may rank websites with signals of quality higher than other sites). Also, links to internal pages increase the overall site’s pagerank. An internal page is any page in your website that is not the home page.

Pagerank is a system that Google uses for ranking webpages. (Very) Simplistically, the higher your pagerank, the higher your website will probably rank for any given term.