The Importance of Keywords…
Search Engines are constantly changing their algorithms, almost on a daily basis it seems. Often these changes reflect many things which take place “off site” for instance links pointing to our website. Just recently Google in particular have changed their policy on paid links, and only want to promote naturally gained links as a good tool for improving your search engine responses, more can be read on Matt Cutts Blog.
Only a few years ago I became obsessed with links, and the effect they had on Page Rank. Back then I would promote purchasing links on respected directories across the web. Most of which had a nominal fee, and being a man on a budget I considered this good value, as, in theory it would generate significant qualified leads to my site from search engines.
Now I will say that I use Google Pagerank as a way of determining how well a site is perceived within Google. I also use a few other methods for testing a site, but I won’t go into them today. The point I am trying to make is that I became obsessed with links and page rank, and yet forgot about the KEY point, Keywords or Keyphrases!
Regardless of the amount of links your site has pointing to it, or how good your Google Page Rank is, if your site doesn’t contain the right keywords/phrases then forget about it. Yes good links will help improve your sites positioning verses the competition, but in a lot of cases, businesses have unique models, which will generally have unique content – resulting in Keywords/Keyphrases which do not have as much, or any, competition.
This is especially true of smaller local businesses. Locally you may not have as much competition, and your business model may not require global domination, Google’s location targeting may be enough for your results to achieve very good results. Your site may not be number 1, but there is a good chance you will appear in the top 10, all providing you have the right keywords/phrases littered throughout your page.
Qualified leads are very important, and locally your site should be able to achieve this. For example my friend Matt owns and runs http://www.mbfitness.net – I redesigned his site sometime last year, and made sure he had the right keywords throughout some of his content. Matt has some links running too and from his site, however by ensuring good use of Keywords, MB Fitness appears fairly well for local searches, especially for qualified keyword phrases like “personal training ipswich”. A large percentage of his traffic is generated from Search Engines, and Matt doesn’t even know what link building or page rank is, well he didn’t at the time – sorry Matt.
Of course, Keywords and Keyphrases alone may not be enough to get your site top of Google. For instance “Search Engine Marketing” generates about 102million results, quite a competitive keyword. But once again, get your keywords in place first, then focus on your link building policy, ensuring good, naturally generated links point to your site.
Keyword Tools:
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