Keywords drive and dictate many aspects of the web. Every term entered into a search engine is matched with relevant keywords to find the most relevant sites to a given search. Should a person search for a term such as ‘ladies shoes’, search engines rapidly crawl their databases looking for the term ‘ladies shoes’, and then using a predefined set of criteria, the search engine will display all the results for the search ‘ladies shoes’. To a search engine, the keywords are ‘ladies shoes’. Through conducting keyword research, we can establish what keywords we should use when constructing a website.

A search engine determines the best matches for a search through a combination of two factors: On page and off page search engine optimization. Off page concerns itself with how many websites link to a website. The number of links, the quality of the linking website, and the context of the linking site all come into play. This determines how far up the search engine results page a site will appear.

On page search engine optimization (SEO) is where the importance of keyword research dictates how we build a website. Taking the example above and after conducting a keyword research into ‘ladies shoes’ we find that the following terms are connected to and are relevant to our search term and keyword, ‘ladies shoes’:

Stilettos, pumps, party, dancing, red, and boots. This means that to find ‘ladies shoes’, web users are using the keywords stated above to find shoes.

By using SEO techniques we can optimize our website to pull through for searches that include the keywords we researched. This means that our website will be determined as relevant to those searches by search engines.

We can largely determine what keywords we want to rank highly for by using the following SEO techniques.

On Page Copy: What we write on a web page is analysed by search engines and keywords listed in their database. If we were to use the keywords we keyword researched above, the greater our chances of being classed as relevant. Similar terms are also a good idea to integrate into the copy. Blogs are particularly good for this.

Title, Meta, Alt Tags and Data: Integrating keywords into these also improve relevancy. Keyword in the title tags and data are especially important to the search engine King, Google. Alt tags tell a search engine what the picture is and are always a good idea to use a keyword here too.

Keyword research can keep your site relevant to search engines and subsequently to customers. In some respects, it is better to carry out your keyword research and use it as a guide to constructing the rest of the site.