SEO for Beginners: Starting With Keywords

Learning how to optimize your website for keywords, also known as search engine optimization, or how to SEO your website is an absolute must for anyone that wants to have a successful web presence on the Internet...but where do you start with the whole SEO campaign? Simple-start with the keywords. But what are these keywords, what keywords should you choose and how do you use them? Defining Keywords to SEO Your Website Keywords and/or keyword phrases are sets of words that your website visitor types into a search engine to find what he is looking for and hopefully it is what your website is offering. This allows the web user to find information, entertainment, products, or services on the Internet. The search engines then "crawl" through websites on the Internet to come up with the most relevant sites that the visitor may find useful. Selecting Keywords and Keyword Phrases SEO for beginners always starts with selecting the right keywords to get the job done. The first and most important thing you need to do is find keywords relevant to the content of your website and then decide whether or not there is too much competition for those keyword phrases. The process of learning how to SEO your website involves looking at the page content. For example, you could choose "beaches" or "Florida beaches" as root keywords to find a Florida beach resort website; however, you'll have a heck of a time getting listed within the first pages of the search engine because your site will be buried in pages of listings and most likely never found. A better strategy is to get more specific. For example, a search for "Naples Florida public beach resorts" yields a more manageable number of results and makes it easier for you to target your visitors by getting listed within the first couple of pages of competition. This is where the focus comes in. You have to add phrases to the root keyword to make sure the keyword phrase is laser-focused enough to attract a suitable number of visitors that are most likely drawn to what you're offering, but not so much competition that your site never gets found. The more specific and relevant your keyword phrases are the better chance you have to capture your relevant audience. Free keyword search tools like Google's Keyword Tool or Word Stream will come in very handy for assessing the statistics of a particular set of keywords. Working with SEO Keyword Phrases - Where to Place Them for Maximum Value While learning how to SEO your website, start by choosing a set of keywords and/or phrases that are relevant to "each" web page. It is important NOT to use the exact same sets of keyword phrases across all pages. Select different sets of keyword phrases for each page based on what the content of each page is all about. In other words, you must dedicate time to do keyword research for every page on the site for the best SEO results. After you've completed your keyword research for a given page, the next step is to actually place them so that their value increases and ultimately helps drive traffic to your website. The most strategic places of a web page to plug in your keyword phrases that help drive the most traffic is in the following keyword locations: 1- Website address, also known as the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) 2- Page title tags 3- Meta description tags 4- Heading tags 5- Image file names and even page buttons should all contain variants of the root keyword or keyword phrases. Placing keyword phrases in these strategic places "saturates" the website with keywords related to the content that it provides, making each web page of the site more visible to the search engines. A website can reach a point where it can be over saturated with keywords. Don't do this-more is not necessarily better in this case. It can lower your SEO positioning with the search engines. It is better to select no more than two to three keyword phrases per web page and place them in the strategic places listed above, as well as, sprinkling them a few times throughout the page content. Remember our "beaches" keyword example? While "beaches" is the root keyword that you will work with, keywords like "Naples Florida public beach resorts" allows you to capture a more laser-focused audience without having to deal with the high competition. You can do a lot more with keywords, but you should first have a basic understanding of how root keywords and their relevant keyword phrases are important to optimizing your web pages when getting started with SEO for beginners.