If Content is King, Keywords are Queen

And we know who controls the King.

Search engines — Google, Bing, Yahoo, Blekko and the many others out there– have a primary purpose: Deliver relevant results to searchers.

Searchers use words to search. Those words are, in search engine parlance, “keywords”.

If you are based in Schenectady NY or anywhere, your website needs to be populated strategically with relevant keywords. If you sell widgets, you want your website to be filled with the word “widget” and its variants, not the word “blodgets”. You sell your widgets only in Albany? You sell only blue ones? You want your website to strategically deploy the keywords “widget” “Albany” and “blue”, and variations thereof.

The choice of relevant keywords and their strategic placement in your online properties is what search engine optimization (SEO) is all about. That is, you are optimizing your website for search engines so that the search engines produce you among the top results, because your website is relevant to those individuals searching for those keywords.

Wait, let’s say you produce a page that has nothing but the words “blue widgets Albany” over and over and over. Keyword rich? Maybe. But is the result relevant to someone searching for those keywords? Probably not. Chances are they want to know about such things as pricing, quality and delivery. Even though the web page has the right keywords, they are not strategically deployed, the page is virtually meaningless, so a search engine will tend to ignore the page.

So how do you know what keywords to use? Here are some ideas:

  1. Think long and hard about what goods or services you offer. What words do people looking for, using, or thinking about those goods or services use to describe them?
  2. Identify what keywords populate your competitors’ websites.
  3. Identify what keywords populate the reigning champions of search (i.e., Page 1 results) for the keywords you have identified.
  4. Get a good thesaurus. Seriously.

How do you research keywords? There are many tools out there. Google Adwords has a great free tool, but it’s not the only tool available. Others include Wordtracker or Goodkeywords.

Sound overwhelming? We can help every step of the way. Contact us about SEO and website design in Schenectady and let’s see if we can help you to identify and strategically use keywords – the queen of content.

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