Kewords are what makes or breaks a website when seeking high
search engine rankings. Keywords in the metatags, title, domain
name, and keyword-rich text all play an important role in
getting a website to the top of the search engines.
The trick to
using keywords (or keyword phrases) is using just enough
without going over. Otherwise your site will end up in the
search engine penalty box and flounder in obscurity. A few
years ago, SEO companies would optimize a website by stuffing
the keyword metatag with a bunch of keywords that may or
may not have been relevant to the site. So a website about
plumbing could make it to the top of the search engines
for the keyword "travel" if that particular metatag
was optimized.
Also, SEO companies,
webmasters and others used to put all sorts of keywords
at the bottom of the site in plain view while others hid
the keywords by making the text the same color as the background.
The search engines have grown so now they pick up on these
"spamming" tricks and will penalize a website
that engages in this type of behavior.
Now days, most
search engines will look at the site's title, metatags and
content to determine what the website is about and how it
should be ranked. If the same keywords show up in all of
these places (and are not spammed in these places) a website
most likely will do better than its competition that do
not have keywords in these places.
In regards to
writing keyword-rich text, the writer has to keep two things
in mind: search engine spiders and visitors. The written
text has to inform, engage and hopefully captivate the visitor
who will wish to further explore the site and perhaps buy
the products or services on the site. The text also has
to be written so that a search engine spider will know what
the dominant keywords are, match these keywords to the title
and metatags and index the web page accordingly. The closer
the keywords are to the top of the page and the beginning
of the first sentence on the page helps with the keywords
relevancy with the search engines.
So, keywords
and keyword phrases are at the heart of search engine optimization.
Without the right amount, in the right places your website
will not fulfill its potential in the search engine rankings.
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