Knowing Your Keywords	Visited: 1612 Not rated Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Stephen Pavis May 11, 2007

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a task for the professionals. However, there’s no reason why you should not try to understand it so you could practice it yourself if only for maintenance purposes.

It’s a Keywords Game SEO is about making your website one of the top results in a search engine query. What search engines do is index web pages. These web pages are scanned and the keywords are indexed by the software made for the purpose. There are also programs to relate the words found to one another so as to find a unifying thread and determine the topic or the purpose of the page. After that, these pages will be ranked according to their category (their purpose). When a keyword is queried, the search engine will yield only the pages that are relevant to the keyword used; these web pages will be those that contain the keyword and related keywords in abundance.

Being returned on top of the list, therefore, necessitates determining the keyword and the related keywords for which you wish to garner top rank. After this crucial step, you need to optimize for these keywords.

Determining Your SEO Keyword(s)

How do you determine the keyword for which you should optimize? This involves (1) determining your site’s purpose; (2) finding out the terms that people who are looking for accounting services online would be likely to use to search the internet; and (3) weighing everything against the competition for the keyword(s).

In the case of an accounting firm, the natural choice of keywords would be ‘accounting services.’ This keyword phrase fulfills the number 1 criterion for the accounting firm obviously provides accounting services. It also fulfills criterion number 2 for it’s the most likely choice of keyword when people are looking for accounting services online.

However, it doesn’t pass criterion number 3 for Google’s keyword tool will tell you that there’s stiff competition for this phrase.

Admittedly, this measure comes from the number of advertisers competing for the keyword in Google’s AdWords scheme, but it is a good enough gauge of the general degree of competition for this keyword.

Google’s tool will show you possible variations on the same theme. In the above example, Google’s keyword tool shows that there are people searching for the term ‘accounting bookkeeping services’ but there’s hardly any competition in AdWords for it. This makes this keyword phrase a good replacement. Thus, instead of optimizing its website for the keyword phrase ‘accountings services’, the accounting firm may be better off optimizing for the keyword phrase ‘accounting bookkeeping services’.

Optimizing Your Web Pages

At this point in the SEO process, you’ll have to apply your chosen keywords to your meta tags and to your web page content. The more keywords (and their related keywords) there are, the better optimized the site is and the better its’ rank in the result for an ‘accounting bookkeeping services’ query.