How Important Is Keyword Relevance?

Understanding Keyword Relevance can mean the difference of having thousands of readers find your articles and having only the ones you notify finding them.

You can spend your time going out and finding clients (and that’s not a bad thing) but it is more efficient to help your potential clients find you. That’s why the “retail” life has been based on “Location, location, location.” Who might walk by and come in?

In the world of the internet, this can be done with keywords used in the articles that you write. When producing articles, assigning keywords to articles is the magic that helps the Search Engines find you.

What are you writing about? If you were looking for information on that topic, what words would you type into a search engine to find it?

Go to a search engine (like Google) and actually type in the words you have chosen and see how many hits you get using those specific key words. This is how many pages your search engine is reporting as using those words. If it is astronomical I would invite you to get out your thesaurus and find what synonyms may work better for you.

Though you may have picked great words that bring a lot of results, recognize that you are competing with that many pages already using those words. It may seem a bit intimidating but you can actually compete with say 60,000 pages (as compared to 160,000,000). When you are doing a search, how often do you look beyond the first page of the search? It stands to reason then that your goal is to eventually get to a high ranking spot on the first page of a search engine. Taking a few minutes to find good keywords is so important in this endeavor.

Google Adwords is a system that can help you find good keywords. (You sign up and are able to use their system whether you actually purchase ads with them or not.) Not only does it tell you the pages that have those words, it also tells you how many times your keywords were typed into the search engine (whether they found anything relevant or not). After all, if people aren’t looking for your keywords, you aren’t going to be found. If you are getting a result that says only 150 people searched for your keyword last month then that is probably not your best choice.

Just like Google is not the only search engine, Adwords is not the only keyword generating system. There are many. I have also used wordtracker.com, alexa.com, kwmap.net, marketsamurai.com to name a few. Each has interesting information that can be beneficial to you. For now, don’t overwhelm yourself. Just choose one and try it out. Once you get to know what it will do for you, then you may one day want to look at another just to see what is there.

Search engines seek out what is relevant to what someone is searching for. If you are doing a search to purchase something you are using different words in the search engines than you would typically use if you were just seeking information on that item. For instance, your keyword for your article may be “Banjo.” Adding keywords like “lessons, beginners, instructions, how to play, chords” helps the search engines define what your article is specifically about. Adding keywords like “purchase, quality, supplies, strings, store, music,” is an entirely different group of people. If you have a single word that describes your article, certainly use that word and also use words that are more descriptive along with it. By using these types of keywords, you are narrowing down the field and providing people with the information they are actually seeking.

Next up…what do I do with these keywords once I have them?

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