So what are these keywords you ask? The answer is actually pretty simply. A keyword (or key phrase) are a word (or words) that someone (hopefully a potential client) types into a search engine to find the product, service or information they are seeking. When a “Searcher” types in this keyword, Google (or whatever search engine you prefer) returns the resulting web pages that it feels best matches the search performed.

The websites displayed are in many cases pages that speak about or provide information for the keyword searched for. For example if someone were to type into Google “Pet Sitting Long Island” the pages returned by Google will (likely) be web sites and pages that are related to companies who offer this service, or articles that discuss this topic (choosing a pet sitter on Long Island) etc.. It is a search engines job to return relevant results to the searcher – without this integrity a search engine is essentially useless.

So you may be thinking – WOW I can think of some incredible keywords that I would like to appear on the first page of the search engine results for…right? Well that’s a great start – but choosing keywords is a science and it must be treated as such. All too often businesses either don’t focus on any specific keywords, or focus on the wrong ones. This is the problem we are attempting to remedy in this series of articles.

In the next articles I will be discussing exactly how to select the appropriate keywords using a sample company. We will go step by step through the process and you will be able to see how to avoid this critical mistake of choosing the wrong keywords for your website.