Are Content Keywords important?

written by Stacy Rosien, SEO

Like the Dewey Decimal System organized countless books on every topic imaginable for the world’s libraries, keywords are an organizational means to serve up SERP’s (Search Engine Results) in modern fashion – research a term and explore the results. As an example, if you search for the term “caribbean travel”, based on the search engine’s algorithm (including keywords) Google serves up about 192,000,000 caribbean travel results in 0.46 seconds. Efficiently amazing!!

Meet Melvin Dewey …

Melvin Dewey created the Dewey Decimal system way back in 1876 to catalogue all the world’s books in an easy to find fashion. Ten classes each with 10 subdivisions, and each with 10 sections organize our libraries. Teleport back to the pre-90’s – do you remember walking up to a wall filled with catalogue card drawers? Your research determined the KEYWORDS that you wanted to search. You found the book’s decimal number and began hunting through the racks for the books best representing your search terms. Not quite 192,000,000 results in 0.46 seconds, but hopefully the major keywords you chose delivered rich content rewarding to your search efforts.

In much the same way the Google supercomputers (and other search providers), take the KEYWORDS you type in the search bar, run back to the unfathomable content stored across the web and return what it  determines the most relevant search engine results relating to your keywords entered.

An unimaginable quantity of results from across the World Wide Web in an inconceivably short time.

Now, yes there are other qualifiers to the data in the complexity of algorithms used by the search engine providers, like geo-patterning, history of your search patterns, other sites visited that are relevant to the search, etc – but what did you begin your search with … “keywords”.

Do you need a keyword search strategy?

So, will your site ever get found if you don’t employ a keyword strategy? Yes, possibly with other algorithm triggers, but the likelihood of appearing in the top results is highly improbable.

Let’s go back to the pre-90’s search example. Take your book on comparative shoe sizes of Shakespearean actors in the 17^th century and send your significant other in to hide it within the stacks somewhere. What’s the likelihood of that thespian finding your book for his thesis among the 150,000 sq feet of library space?

Without the guidance of an organized search method, your efforts are worse than finding a gold earring in a corn silo.

Findability ~ the art of being found

There are other facets to the FINDABILITY of your site. Rich relevant content (what’s in the title, H1’s and H2’s – content specific keywords!), with conversations or inbound links validating the relevance of your content (social media conversations and external links like ”Is content King or Social Media?” use keywords to validate it’s relevance to the keywords in the linked post).

Keywords need to be an integral element of any web strategy – whether it’s your website, blog or social media campaign. The Dewey Decimal system was cumbersome and time-consuming compared to today’s search engine results, but a keyword strategy did enable “5 Nudist Resorts that will Blow your Mind” to organically appear on the first page of Google’s search results with only content, chatter and a strong keyword strategy. With page views of 32,400 so far in 2011 – thanks to you now 32,401 – a FINDABILITY strategy that employed keywords helped it be found.

Don’t discount the value of a keyword strategy to assist the findability of your site or blog. Without it your position in search results are likely much farther down in the 3.74 million other sites for that term. And we all know, if your content isn’t on the first page of a search query, it’s unlikely anyone’s going to dig deeper to find it – never mind click on it.

So where do you start?

• Check out your competition to see how they approach the keyword issue?
• Read blogs that write about the product or service you sell.
• Find a reliable SEO expert and get advice on a keyword and content strategy.

A keyword strategy can be a massive project to undertake but don’t think you have to change everything all at once. Every page on your site is like a book in the Dewy Decimal System. Changing one page at a time can significantly change your appearance in search results.

Post a comment below and let’s start talking.

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