Keywords

Keywords are the terms searchers use to find what they’re looking in Google.

Website owners must establish a suitable list of words that match the pages on their sites so that Google will associate the site with what searchers are looking for. The list of keywords should be ordered according to their importance and relevance. Several techniques exist to do this.

Part of the optimisation process is then to deploy those keywords on pages throughout the site. They are also used in page titles, page descriptions, links and in the text of the pages themselves.

Care must be taken that you don’t indulge in what Google calls "keyword stuffing" (using too many keywords on a page so that it becomes unreadable). While Google does penalise sites (by giving them lower rankings) for keyword stuffing it also goes out of its way to help with the problem by supplying suitable synonyms to the keywords so that page content becomes more readable.

You should also be on the lookout for so-called "Long-tails keywords” which are little-used but valid keywords that can produce spectacular results in terms of ROI. By their very nature they don’t click in very often but when they do . . . .