Reader Question: What Are Keywords?

flight attendant.
Originally uploaded by solecism

What are keywords, you ask? Great question!

First let me tell you a story:

Once upon a time many years ago there was a major airline that wanted to drive traffic to their website. In particular, they wanted to attract people who were looking for inexpensive air travel fares.

So, they created a gorgeous website and on appropriate pages on their website they talked about their “inexpensive air travel fares”.

They thought, “Who doesn’t want to travel inexpensively? Surely we will get lots of search engine traffic to our site because we’ve made it clear that we specialize in inexpensive air travel fares!”

But their faces fell when they saw their website traffic stats–they were hardly getting any site visitors at all, and they were extremely perplexed and disappointed.

“Why?!” they asked. “We know that oodles of people want inexpensive air travel fares, so why isn’t Google sending all those people to our site?”

Then one day a wise person answered their cries of distress and confusion.

She said to them, “The reason why Google isn’t sending any traffic to your website is because no one is interested in inexpensive air travel fares.”

The airline people were outraged. “What?”, they demanded. “Who in their right mind would prefer to pay a higher price for an airline ticket? Everyone always wants the lowest price.”

“You’re exactly right about that,” the wise person told them. “Everyone does want the lowest cost that they can get, but there is one problem. When these people go to Google they are not searching for inexpensive air travel fares.”

Intrigued, the airline people asked, “Well, then what in the world are our potential customers typing into Google?”

The wise person told them, “They’re typing in the words “cheap flights”.”

Keywords Tell Google What Your Website (Or Article) Is About

According to Wikipedia, keywords are words with special significance that identify and classify the content on a web page.

When the search engine customer types words (such as “cheap flights” or “inexpensive air travel fare”) into the search box, the words are called a “search term”.

It may help to keep in mind that search terms are thought of as keywords only from the perspective of the website owner who is trying to anticipate which words the search customer will type into the search box.

Think about it–search engines are designed to serve the needs of the searcher, rather than the website owner. When someone types in the words “cheap flights” into the search box, the search engine wants to give them a list of web pages that are most likely to satisfy their query ranked in order with the web pages that are most likely to satisfy at the top.

Google evaluates how well a web page can satisfy search customers by examining the content on the web page (among other things).

As website owners who are trying to cooperate with Google and the other search engines, not only do we need to make it very clear what our website is about, but we also kind of have to think backwards–we have to think like a search engine customer would think.

Learning To Think Backwards

Now, in the fairy tale story above about the airline, the people who worked at the airline didn’t take into consideration that most of us do not usually say “Hmm, I need to travel to San Diego. I wonder who has the most inexpensive air travel fares?”.

No, we don’t talk like that . The people at the airline might talk like that, but we, the search engine customers just say “Where can I get a cheap flight?”

As website owners who are trying to attract certain types of search customers, we do research to pinpoint which keywords are appropriate for our website based on what our potential customers are typing into Google when they do searches. (If you want to get more in depth you can research how much demand there is for a certain search term and how saturated the internet is with web pages already meeting that need–more on this in another post.).

When we write content on our website or do article marketing or whatever, we keep in mind what our keywords are for our website so that we can send a clear message to Google. We want to proclaim to Google–My website provides great information about “cheap flights” (as opposed to “inexpensive air travel fares)!

That way when a person types “cheap flights” into the search box, Google goes, “Ahh, I remember seeing a website that I’m positive will satisfy this search customer’s query. Let me show them that site as one of the results.”

Now, of course this is a dramatization to try to make this keywords thing easier to understand –what is happening on Google’s end is technical and based on many factors, but as far as keywords go, we know that we need to provide the information that our customers are searching for, using the words that they use, or variations of the words that they use.

Keywords tell the search engines what your website (or article) is about, and we want to be sure that we’re using phrases or variations of phrases that our customers really use.

What does SubmitYOURArticle.com do with the keywords I type in?

When you’re filling in the “Enter Your New Article” page at SubmitYOURArticle.com, there is a space where you’re asked to enter your keyword phrases.

What exactly is done with the keywords that you type into the keywords box when you’re entering your article?

The keywords you type in are used on many sites (including our own article directory) where some keywords are wanted for the meta keywords tags for the page where the article is published. It also helps search functions on some article directories.

In plain English–it’s a technical thing to help Google and the other search engines (and search functions on the directory itself) determine what your article is about.

Whew! I hope that helps explain what keywords are a little bit more, but you probably have other questions like:

How do I do keyword research?

And then what do I do with my keywords after I’ve figured out what they are?

We’ll go over those questions in upcoming posts, but for now–do you feel like you have a better grip on what keywords are? I hope so!

Related resources you may find helpful:

How To Appropriately Use Your Keywords In Your Article Titles

How Do I Get Started With Keyword Research?

SEO Article Writing 101 (scroll down to the section about keywords)

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