What are Keywords? A Quick Introduction

If you’re new to search engine optimization and marketing you might be hearing the word “keyword” thrown around quite a bit. What is a keyword? Well, the answer to that question isn’t complicated, but it does take a little bit of explaining.

What is a keyword?

A keyword is the words and phrases that someone using a search engine inputs into the search bar to try and find something online. These keywords are often known as search queries. While the actual content of a search query is likely different from an individual keyword, the keyword represents the idealized version of a query.

So, if you are searching for shoes, and you say “running shoes for men size 12” there are numerous “ideal” keywords that fit that query. Examples of keywords related to this query might be “men running shoes” or “men’s athletic shoes.”

What do keywords do?

When a page on your website is filled with keywords that relate to what you believe people are searching for, Google reads your website’s text and metadata and attempts to direct traffic to your store in the form of placing you on the search engine results page (or SERP). You want the keywords on your page to be as relevant to what people are searching for as possible, as this will increase the likelihood of customers or searchers finding what you’ve created.

This is what marketers mean when they refer to creating content for the algorithm. Writing content that meets the sorting and ranking criteria of Google’s search algorithm is an ever-evolving and constantly shifting process.

Why are keywords important?

The keywords that you choose determine the type of traffic that you get. Website traffic is good, right? Well, not necessarily. You want your keywords to be relevant as well. The keyword serves as the fulcrum between site visitors and your site.

Picking keywords that are relevant to the page they are used within is essential, because you want to have customers who are querying within the ballpark of your content discovering your pages.

Creating quality pages with quality keywords requires you to understand the mind of the people that you want to search for your content. You need to understand their needs and wants, and how they’re translating them into search queries.

How do I start using them?

All this sounds complicated, right?

Well, there are tools to help, like Moz’s Keyword Explorer or Answer the Public. Tools like these can help you generate keywords to place within your pages and start catching more traffic.

The key is to start creating interesting content for your website. That can start with the workhorse of the content creation stable--the blog. A blog that tries to target individual keywords for a given topic can go a long way towards generating organic traffic, though it is not the only thing.

A good rule of thumb when creating any content is to ensure that it is something that someone else would like to read. While that might seem overly simplistic, getting too wrapped up in what a search algorithm might want can create unnecessary obstacles to your quest to creating good content. It’s always possible to optimize a great blog for keywords, but making a quality keyword article that is ultimately a waste of time to read is something else entirely.

Where to go from here

There’s more to creating compelling content than just placing the right keywords on a page. In fact, there’s a lot more to using keywords than just finding the right terms to target. A good next step is to start learning about focus keywords, and what they can do to help structure and guide the writing process of a piece of content. This article will show you how to do that.

Good luck, and happy optimizing!