Why Keywords Matter
I just spent some time on a couple of active webmaster and blogger forum sites … I was looking for an answer and some advice to some questions I had … and I found the answers … but what struck me most was the number of guys and gals who were posting messages and even pleas for help that all sounded like this … "why doesn’t anyone come to my site"?
Many times I saw experienced folks trying to give advice but they were often stymied by one factor .. when they asked the person with the problem what the theme of their site was, or more directly what keywords they were optimizing for the answer was typically the typed equivalent of the "deer in the headlights look".
Some people even got a little upset or argumentative … "I’m not using AdSense" … "I’m not trying to make money" … "I just want traffic" … and so on. Let me clue you in on something. If you want to make money online, or if you don’t care about making money online makes virtually no difference in how you set things up.
Making money is only a function of having traffic … actual people clicking on the URL that brings them to your blog or website. If people don’t find your website it’s a lot like trying to start a restaurant on the back porch of someone’s house on a residential street. Hungry people may be all around, but they’ll never find you … unless, perhaps, you hire a pretty girl in a short skirt to stand on the sidewalk with a great big sign that says, "Good Eats, Around Back", and pay her a bonus for every hungry passerby who makes his or her way into the eatery.
You may not realize it, but you are already employing that pretty girl … and she works really cheap, and she’s on the jon 24-7. Her name is Google and sometimes her sisters Yahoo! or MSN substitute for her … but when someone is looking for good food in your area she does are really bang-up job of getting them out of their cars and into your diner.
That’s right, keywords work exactly like the advertising girl. Someone wants something, Google searched through the index of the entire Internet and pops up pages of sites that "serve" what the person is "hungry" for. The analogy of the girl with the signboard is even closer to ‘Net reality than you think, because Google, in particular, tailors the search to find places close by the hungry customer first. After all, why drive across town for ahome cooked meal when there’s a good place to eat right on your block?
And the tool that enables Google to do this sometimes miraculous searching? Keywords! Keywords are, very simply the words that Google has determined indicate what your site is all about.
But I don’t use keywords I hear some of you saying, a bit puzzled. Actually, you do. Keywords are nothing more than the words that Google can read when it ‘crawls" your site or blog. Unless you have a site that consists of nothing but blank pages, you’re using keywords. The difference between the men and the boys? How you’re using them.
Keywords are Like Oxygen
Keywords are to websites like oxygen is to humans. Read that once again. I believe it to be completely 100% undeniably true! Here’s why… Comscore.com reported in 2004 that 83% of people who made an online purchase began with a keyword search. Comscore.com also just recently reported online spending is on the rise and showing no signs of slowing down. And that probably translates into a higher percentage of people typing in keywords to make an online purchase by the time this was authored (late 2006).
As one very bright Internet Strategist, Ken Giddens, said…"The Internet is like a great big version of the Family Feud
Game. When I think about the Internet it reminds me of that television game show "The Family Feud." The way the game show worked is that the producers of the game show would poll the audience on a question like “What are the top 10 things you would find in a kitchen?”The contestants are then supposed to guess what the top 10 most popular words the audience thought of for things found in a kitchen. It didn’t matter if the contestant came up with a brilliant answer, if the contestant’s answer was not on the audience’s list, then the contestant’s team was out of the game and the other team got a chance at the money.
The Internet is just like that game show. Your opinion doesn’t mean anything. Your website is not about you, it’s about your visiting audience. It doesn’t matter what words you think they will use to find your website. The only words that matter are the actual words that the Internet visitor types in the search engine search box when he is looking for a website just like yours.
If you haven’t optimized your website to be found for those keyword phrases, then you are out of the game and your competitors are going to get their chance at the money." Internet Strategist, Ken Giddens,
Yes, Ken was writing about money, but remember, as I said at the beginning, money is only one possible result of traffic … visitors. Read that sentence that I highlighted in red again, and then one more time. Figure out who your audinece is and what they are looking for and ther rest will all fall into place.
No posts seem to be related. Try Search for more info on this subject.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
I get relatively steady traffic on some of my sites - enough to pull in a couple hundred dollars a month. The problem is that it is steady and has been so for nearly two years, not increasing. My project for the next couple of months is to change that and part of that is to optimize for keywords while maintaining the quality of the material. Other things that I will be doing is participating in forums and commenting on blogs in the niches appropriate for those sites. Besides keywords, another important contributer to search traffic is the number of quality links coming in to the site as well as those going out.