Should you be focusing on keywords for your SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?  No, you should be concentrating on your keyword phrases.

A keyword phrase is a significant phrase in the title, subject headings, contents notes, abstract, or text of a record in an online catalogue or database which can be used as a search term in a free-text search to retrieve all the records containing it.

A keyword phrase describes keywords that consist of multiple words. All terms used in the search engines are referred to as keywords; however in most instances the keyword is made up of more than one word and therefore it should be referred to as a keyword phrase.
Keyword and keyword phrase are used as synonyms, because most searchers use more than one keyword to search. As the search engines index continues to grow the searchers ability to specify what they are looking for by using lager keyword phrases increases.

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SMO), the term keyword is extremely misleading. You are not (or you should not be) focusing on a word. In the interest of accuracy, what you should be doing is determining what keyword phrase or phrases will be most effective. The strategy when doing keyword research and selection should not be about a word.

More specific keyword phrases are going to have a significantly higher conversion rate to purchases on your website. You want to focus on the hundreds or even thousands of specific keyword phrases that closely match the services, products, brands, and locations you sell or serve.

Take notice of how long the keyword phrases you are using and the length of your keyword phrases that gives the best results when you search.

So how do you find the long keyword phrases people are using? You need to develop a large seed keyword list and put it into the search engines to get related keyword and keyword phrases that searchers have used.

It makes good sense to target long keyword phrases that search precisely for what you provide. Search engines are building the search results on user interaction. You can therefore get the search engine to send you more searchers if you can get the people to stay on your website longer, bookmark it, buy your product, return to your website, etc. With todays search engines it is difficult to compete with the big websites if you have a small website, because quality and quantity means a great deal. One of the ways to get an advantage on a larger competitor is to work more efficiently by optimizing for the long keyword phrases that bring potential customers who are ready to buy.

Is it beneficial or harmful to repeat keyword phrases? The answer is repetition is fine, as long as the meaning of the phrase as a whole is sufficiently varied. The more important concept to keep in mind is you want to choose keyword phrases that best relate to the content present on a web page and on a website. If you do not have a comparison matrix, then do not bother including comparison-related keyword phrases. This is misleading your users, and it is not fooling the search engines.

Keyword phrases should guide your overall content strategy. When you think about strategy think about a process. Your keyword phrases should reflect what users are seeking and the way the search engines “think” about keyword phrases. This should drive your content strategy. Know your keyword phrases then you search and then you optimize your website. Make it your primary focus to optimize for long target keyword phrases.

Here are the places you should be using your keyword phrases:

• The title is important and should include your primary keyword phrase.
• If your description contains the search term people enter, and it is the first text that the Googlebot comes across, then you have a good chance that Google will display your description in the results.
• The tags used throughout an article should contain keywords.
• The writer should understand what the keyword phrases are and use them in natural language on the page.
• The words used in live links tell the search engine what “this page” is about and also what the “linked-to page” is about.
• For every image, write an alt attribute tag; this is good for accessibility and optimization.

*Did You Know? Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all webmasters needed to do was to submit the address of a page or URL, to the various engines which would send a “spider” to “crawl” that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 12th, 2012 at 9:56 pm and is filed under Design and Development, SEO, Social Media - SMO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.