SEO and the Importance of Keywords

We've taken you through the basics and informed you of the importance of planning your strategy and setting out clear goals and now we're going to continue our guide by taking you further into the world of SEO and showing you just what makes it tick.

Hopefully by now you all know just what SEO is, so what does it take to make it work? To put it simply…keywords.

SEO has been around for a long time but it seems that many people still have yet to fully grasp the importance of keywords. Keywords are industry specific  i.e. Divorce lawyer, accident and injury lawyer, hair colour specialists, mobile spray tanning (you get the picture) and are the common words that users type into search engines hence the most important element in your SEO and PPC strategy will be your keywords. Keywords are crucial not just for the optimisation for the purpose of search engines but they help you to communicate your website and hence your business in the words that the users would themselves use. With keywords you cut out the jargon and reach your audience in the simplest and easiest way possible.

Selecting the right keywords can be the most difficult task; far too many people select what their personal opinion draws them too but keyword selection is a tricky business and requires a lot of research. For successful optimisation even the smallest business needs at least 500 words on their list.

In-depth market research will help determine just which keywords are the ones that stand out, analysing your competitor's sites will enable you to determine anything you might have missed and tools such as wordtracker and Google's keyword suggestion tool will mean no stone is left unturned in keyword research. It is crucial that this is a task that is done right to ensure your site is optimised to its best and comes out on top in your industry field.

Once the right keywords have been determined there will come the task of ensuring that these are appropriately optimised within your site and any linked content. It will be only too tempting to place the keywords onto one page a hundred times over to get that much needed boost but unfortunately Google is far too smart for that malarkey. Any copy produced has to be of the highest standard and make sense or Google won't be too happy.

Using the right keywords in the right areas of your site optimisation is what will take your site from a needle in a haystack to the highly visible, high ranking site that is ready to ward off any competition.

Keywords are the integral cog in the SEO machine and once this is fixed into place then all else will flow.