Understanding Keywords

Keywords drive discovery and advertising on the internet - period. So, keywords are a great topic to understand. Let's look for a moment at the words on your website...
When a search engine indexes (or crawls or spiders) your site, it sees all of the individual words you've used and it knows how frequently you've used them. Those words also combine in your copy to make up phrases of course.
When a user performs a search they use individual words and phrases. What words and phrases are they likely to use to find the kind of information or products on your site? Consider those words and phrases - keywords. Now, how likely are searching with those keywords to put your web site at the top of the list of search results?

Let's look at a quick example. If you had to judge two web sites, to see which one best matches the keyword phrase 'best selling cars.' The only information you have is the list of words used in the pages on the site - what would you do?
I suspect you might do a word count, ranking your list by how frequently all the words on the site were used. Then if a page on site a looked like this, where rank 1 is the most used word:

1. selling
2. upholstery
3. reliable
4. cars
5. best
6. ...

and the word ranking on a page for site b looked like this:

1. dashboard
2. league
3. table
4. best
5. cars
15. ...selling

Which site would you list first? If you had no other data and you had to match the keywords in the phrase, you would have to choose site 'a' as the best match - and so the highest ranking. The site 'b' includes the keywords, but not as predominantly. So out of these two, you'd have to rank it as second. When you get a list of results from a search engine, they are listed in ranked order.

According to Netcraft's Web Server Survey (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html) there are now more than 80 million web sites on the internet. Not every single one of them is indexed. But search engines like Google and MSN do have billions of pages in their databases.
So, now imagine that you have millions of sites and billions of pages to choose from rather than two. I've just entered the words 'best selling cars' in to Google.com and it estimates that there are about 58,000,000 pages that might match my search!

With so much choice, search engines have to do much more than count words in order to decide the rank of their results. For example Google was created on the back of a Stanford research project nicknamed 'BackRub'. The nickname comes from its use of backlinks, that is, links from other sites to yours, to determine your sites importance (and before you go off a join a 'link network', the rank of the sites linking to your site is critical too).

Another example of how search engines calculate the importance of keywords is their placement on the page - or more usefully, the tags associated with the keywords. For example, if the keyword appears in a heading tag like 'h1' (normally, the main heading at the top of the page) that would rank higher than if the keyword simply appeared in the body text. The implication is that this page is all about that keyword.

The two most important requirements for a search engine are the number of sites it has in its index and its ability to give users the most accurate results. Ranking is how the search engines compete with each other and deliver these 'accurate results' so there is plenty speculation on the exact details of how they achieve it. You can read Google's description of ranking here: http://www.google.com/technology/ and MSN has a ranking section listed off here: http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx. Actually, with MSN Search you can choose how you want your results ranked... click on the 'Search Builder' option underneath the search box at http://search.msn.com and look at the 'Results Ranking' option.
Yes, if you want your site to appear on the first or second page of a set of search results, keywords are critical. But it's not just about search results. If you are using keyword based advertising like Google AdSense on your site, it chooses the ads based on a keyword analysis of the page. If you are advertising using search based advertising like Google AdWords, you have to pick the keywords against which you ad will appear.
As you can see, understanding keywords can make a huge difference your success on the internet.

To learn more, take a look at our keyword research tools page.
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