What are keywords and why are they important?

Do you know what keywords your website is currently ranking for online? Keywords are very important for every business website as they drive targeted web traffic to your business for free. When done well, using the right keywords can skyrocket your business to sales success online.

Before we get into the details of what you need to do to rank effectively for certain keywords, some of you might be wondering, “what is a keyword?”

Keywords are the words and phrases that Internet users type into search box of a search engine, such as Google, to find what websites that match what are looking for.

Some keywords get hundreds of thousands of unique searches a day while others get a couple of hundred. At the same time, some high trafficked keywords are very competitive online because many businesses are trying to get referrals and traffic from users when they search for those keywords while others are not.

In choosing a keyword for your business, it is very important to put some time and thought into researching keywords. There are some good free tools online such as the Google Keyword Research tool and Wordtracker that can help get you started in researching keywords relevant to your business. These tools can be very useful for getting insights about how many users are searching for a given keyword and how much competition there is for the keyword online. This can also give you a realistic sense of what keywords you should be using on your website and how effective they will be in marketing your site online.

Once you have researched keywords for your business, you can develop a  simple plan of action for implementing those keywords on your site. Our search optimization tools in our Yola Gold package are really helpful for advice on adding keywords to all the important and hidden areas of your website. For the sake of this article, let’s say you have a website about organic chocolate and based on your keyword research, you came up with the following keywords to target:

• Chocolate truffles
• Organic chocolate
• Organic dark chocolate
• Health benefits of chocolate

It would then make sense to create pages on your website targeting those keywords by providing relevant information to online searchers about what they are looking for. We have created some in depth information about how to develop content targeted at specific keywords to improve how you optimize your site for search engines online through our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tutorial or our guest blog post: How to Drive Profitable Traffic to Your Website with Long Tail SEO.

Some businesses choose to include keywords relevant to their business site domain name. This strategy works as well as long as it is inline with the brand identity you have for your website. One thing to avoid though is excessively using hyphens in your domain name such as www.travel-south-america-easy-free.com as it makes your business appear unprofessional and might even make users avoid your website when it is listed online. If you don’t have a domain, this article can help you understand how to choose your domain and business name.

Putting some thought into target keywords for your website is an investment worth making. With the free tools and resources available online, it will be easy for you to get started on thinking about ways to use targeted keywords to get qualified leads to your website’s pages.