Keywords and Keyword Phrases

Does Your Website Work?

Try this experiment:

Imagine you are surfing the web. You are looking for a particular product -- maybe a piece of jewellery, a gift, a place to stay for a weekend break. How would you find this on the web?

• You don't know the name of the product
• You don't know the name of any particular company

First you would go to one of the big search engines -- Google, Yahoo, MSN etc -- and then type in some words. Maybe 2 or 3 to get started. A list will appear: usually 10 on the first page, but there may be millions of other possible results and they are all trying to attract your attention.

Perhaps you would then add 1 or 2 more words to your search to narrow down what you are looking for. Again there are usually far too many results for you to spend time searching through them all. So you'll probably look at a couple of the links listed on the first page.

You may find that the results that you are given do not quite match what you are looking for, so you may change some of the word or phrases - trying to narrow down your search to find pages or sites that will help you find the information you are looking for.

Try this for your website:

Type into Google or another search engine, the exact name of your business, inside quotation marks.

For example, if I type into Google "High Forest Web Works", I would find this website listed at the top of the first page. Great! You've seen advertisements guaranteeing to place your website on the first page - this is a way of doing it!

But if someone else was looking for your business or mine, without knowing who we are, the words they would use wouldn't be so specific. So we are unlikely to be found on the first page.

• Do any of your pages appear on the first page?
• Or the second page?
• Who is going to find you?
• If you can't be found, your website isn't working!

Choosing keywords

If you don't choose effective keywords for every single page on your website, all your efforts to boost your visibility in search engine results, will be wasted.

More information about choosing keywords

Researching keywords

Don't just guess what keywords will be the best for your pages. There are online tools that can help you research effective keywords for your website.

More information about researching keywords

Keywords - where to use them

There is a general misconception that keywords go in the "meta-tags" and that is all there is to it!

Keywords and keyword phrases need to be used naturally, throughout your page, to reinforce the focus of that page and "behind the scences" in the coding of the page

More information about where to use keywords

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If you have more questions or you need more help or advice, please contact us and we will endeavour to help you ~ without any obligation.