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When we talk about SEO, keywords are a pivotal area of research. So it becomes very importance for us to know What Keywords are? Keywords form the foundation of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Their goal is to attract the traffic to your site, as well as ensuring that the right traffic can find your site, by ranking your website higher.

In layman language keywords are words or phrases on a website that match the words or phrases that people are looking for on their search engines. Narrowing down a list of keywords that your audience uses while searching on the search engine can help optimise the content in order to answer their queries. This also allows the audience to find your content easily. Additionally, the website’s SEO strategy can be built in a way that targets specific phrases and optimizes the content. This would result in an increase in the relevant traffic.

Choose right set of Keywords for your website

The importance of keywords can be drawn out from the fact that keywords can help target and optimize your content. Additionally, it is one of the most significant metrics that can be used to assess your success.

The process of using right keywords for your website:

● Determine keywords

● Apply keywords optimization on your website

● Track keyword rankings, traffic and conversions

This process should be done persistently, numerous times, while improving the content with new target keywords.

How to determine the right keywords?

Simply put, keywords are just “search queries”. These are the words searched by users in the search engines. If the keywords searched by users in the search engine match the ones on your website, it enables them to find your website easily. Thus the basics of using keywords, as a part of your SEO strategy, is to figure out a list of relevant keywords and incorporate them in your website.

Types of keywords

There are many different type of keywords but here we will mainly talk about the two main types of keywords:

a) Head Keywords: These are the popular keywords with high search volumes, and have a much wider topic relevance. They are very relevant, and are also searched a lot.

b) Tail keywords: These are the precise keywords that are used to find specific pieces of information. These usually have a lower search volume and are easier to rank for. These keywords make it easier to attract the right traffic. Thus your content should incorporate both of these types of keywords.

Furthermore, ‘Search Volume’ and ‘User Intent’ should also be taken into consideration, while determining keywords.

Search volume includes those words which are being searched more frequently by the audience in a given timeframe. They have the potential to increase traffic on the website.

User Intent is the intent with which the user was searching a particular keyword. User intent should be considered when prioritizing the content.

User intent has 4 broad categories:

a) Informational intent: The user is simply looking for information, learning or exploring a topic, or answering a specific question.

b) Navigational intent: The user knows roughly where they want to end up, or they’re searching for a specific web page, and normally knows the website they’re looking for.

c) Transactional intent: The user is searching with the intention to buy in the near future.

d)Commercial intent: The user is searching with the intention to buy, but not quite yet, and they’re doing research before they can make a purchase decision

How do google rankings and keywords related?

The search results generated on Google depend not only on the popularity and specificity of a keyword, but also on the Google rankings given by professional rankers working for Google.

Google rankings favor content that is newer than other content, longer than similar content. A better organized webpage showcasing Contains pages with video with better loading time.

For these reasons your keywords should be:

a) Integrated into titles and headers.

b) Inserted grammatically into your content

c) Positioned in or near video content.

d) Incorporated into authoritative, long-form, written material

Once the list of keywords is established, the next step is to incorporate them into your website.

Ways to make the keywords work for you

Now that you have established a list of good keywords, the next important thing is to make them work for you, in a way that enables you to get good results. One strategy for this could be to place them everywhere on your website, especially the important places. For example, place the keywords in your headings, the body texts, the URLs,

the meta tags or even the image file names. While this could work effectively, this will be difficult to implement since the most optimized websites are likely to have thousands or even millions of keywords. Thus, they can’t effectively make a new page for each keyword or fit in all of them in a few pages. It would be impossible, and definitely not a good SEO strategy.

The solution to this problem is keyword grouping and keyword mapping.

Keyword Grouping

Keyword Grouping is actually a pretty overlooked part in the SEO and keywords strategy. It is important to realize that creating effective and organized keywords groups can improve the performance of your website significantly.

Keywords Mapping

Another important task to focus on is keyword mapping. It is important to map out which particular page each keyword will go on. This is important, in order to ensure that all the important keywords aren’t crammed into the front page, and also that only identical keywords aren’t used across all the web pages.

The method to decide on which web page a particular keyword will go on, is by focusing on the content of that page. It can be helpful to enter a specific keyword in google, and see which page shows up. The keyword should be used on the page, with similar content to the top search results.

Other factors that affect you performance

After the subgroups are created, you should also keep in mind certain other factors that can affect your performance. This can include:

a) Plurals and Derivations: All of the plurals and derivations of a particular keyword should be included in their parent group, not in another group or subgroup.

b) Misspellings: Google or any other search engines can easily recognize misspellings, and thus there is no need to create separate groups for misspellings. The search engines will just redirect the searcher.

c) Synonyms: In the case of synonyms, you should create a separate group for them. This will lead to a more optimized website.

Iteration and reiteration

The last stage of this process is the iteration and reiteration. Keyword grouping and organization is an ongoing process. If it’s not treated as an ongoing process, your website will face stagnation and degradation. Continuous research, and frequent revisiting and refinement of the keyword groups and organization is a reliable way of guaranteeing your success.

Things to avoid while using keywords

One thing to avoid in this process is keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing involves cramming a huge bulk of keywords into a website, especially at the expense of the content. One one hand, using a lot of keywords is often recommended, but when the website is absolutely overcrowded with keywords and the content is poor, it can actually have the opposite effect, as compared to what we intended to get. Google and other search engines are smart enough to recognize keyword stuffing, and will absolutely rank your website lower if it contains a lot of keyword stuffing, since the content is not good enough.

Search engines are always evolving, and the algorithms always aim to give the most relevant content to the user, thus making content a priority over keywords.

Another thing to keep in mind is the target audience. It is important to create your content, by keeping the right audience in mind. If this is not done, not only will it attract the wrong audience, but the right audience may never find your content. If the wrong audience ends up at your website, might find your content isn’t what they were looking for, and so they will end up leaving the website, as well as, avoiding it in the future. For this reason, it is important to figure out keywords that can attract the right target audience. Also, while updating your list of keywords, make sure to eliminate the ones that attract the wrong audience.

Are there any specific limits of keywords use?

One question that marketers tend to have is how many keywords should they use for their websites. The answer to this question is that there is no specific amount of keywords that you can use to make your website rank higher. Use as many as you like, but use them effectively. Increasing the density of keywords just to increase the number of keywords is not recommended, as discussed above. But sprinkling the keywords effectively throughout the website, especially at the key areas, while also making sure that the content is of good quality is important.

Diversify your list of keywords

A big mistake that beginners tend to make is that they only do SEO keyword research once and don’t update their list of keywords. Another mistake they make is that they use keywords that are too common or popular, thus making it more competitive. In this way, they end up not getting the benefit of their keywords at all.

The solution to this problem is diversification. You have to diversify your list of keywords, in order to stand out from your competitors. This can be done by being open and flexible with your list of keywords. Use new keyword search tools, experiment on your own by comparing to websites that use similar keywords, and keep track of the results.

The key to standing out from your competitors is to provide great content that specifically answers the questions of your customers that they are asking with their keyword research.

In a Nutshell...

The most important thing is to just keep updating your list of keywords, essentially performing constant iteration and reiteration. As your business grows and evolves, the keyword research should also grow and improve. If this is not done, eventually, you will stagnate or even degrade. Thus new keywords should be added to the keyword list, the old keywords should be re-evaluated periodically, and the popular ones could also be changed to longer and more specific phrases, that enables not just customers to find your website, but also in bringing the right customers to your website (the ones actively looking for your services). If you are expanding a certain branch of the business, then it will also require you to incorporate relatable keywords. Most importantly, you should remain aware of the changes in your industry and competing businesses, and keep researching keywords regularly.

In conclusion, keywords are an essential part of the online business strategy. They enable you to not only attract large amounts of traffic, but also to attract the highly qualified traffic, while optimizing your site’s conversion rates.