When it comes to having good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), keywords a pretty important. Whenever you search for
something on Google, Bing or any other search engine, you may not realise it, but you are using keywords or keyword phrases.
In this blog, you will find out why keywords are such an important part of SEO and how you can how you can use them in your
website.
When you think of your business, you need to ask yourself; what question might someone ask, that my business can answer?
Write these questions down, and there you have the beginnings of your keywords. With these keywords, there are some things
you can do to include them in your website. Now, this is the very basic way of explaining this, so here is some more detail…
Once you have created your list of keywords for your business, you need to look at whether they are broad or specific search
terms. Although it may seem better to include really popular, broad keywords, this isn’t necessarily the case. Think about it this
way, if all your keywords are really popular and get hundreds of thousand searches a month, how likely is it that your business
will rank highly? It might be better to use more specific, localised keywords, that might have fewer monthly searches, but your
business might rank higher on this search term, and then increase traffic to your website. Success!
Another aspect to consider when creating you list of keywords or phrases, is how many ways are there to word a keyword phrase?
Someone might word something one way, but someone else might word it another. The phrases would mean the same, but your
business could potentially rank differently for the altered wordings. To avoid this, when producing the content for your website, try to
add in the different wordings of keyword phrases, to help your rankings for the different phrases.
Now, onto a part of keywords that is a little bit more technical. When creating your website, you probably heard of something called
meta tags. These meta tags might sound scary if you don’t understand them, but let me explain. There are three types of meta tags
to consider, meta title, meta description and meta keywords.
Meta title is what shows up when your website appears in a search engine. Simply, the section that is coloured in blue (or purple if
you’ve clicked on it), and is the first thing someone sees when your website appears on search results. It is important to include your
keywords in your title, as this will help your rankings for that keyword. It is also important to have the keywords towards the
beginning of the title, to further increase the likelihood of ranking highly.
Meta description, this sounds even more scary than meta title, but it really isn’t. Your meta description doesn’t actually affect how well
you rank on a search engine. It is more important for actual humans than it is search engine crawlers*. If you don’t include a meta
description, the search engine will just take a snippet of your websites content and put it there inside, but sometimes it is better if
you set one yourself, because this way you have full control over what information people see.
And finally, meta keywords. Like meta description, these don’t affect your SEO, so luckily, you don’t really need to worry about these.
There you have it, hopefully you now know why keywords are important, and can go back to creating or maintaining your website,
add in your keywords, and eventually rank higher on search engines. Ranking highly and having good SEO isn’t something that
will happen overnight, but if you spend the time now to improve SEO, hopefully in the future, you’ll be ranking on that 1st page.
