What Are Keywords?
Once you’ve decided to start your own online
business, you’ll first want to get a firm grasp on how your potential customers
use the Internet. In particular, you’ll need
to learn what exactly they use the Internet for.
It would certainly be great for your company
if every person who logged on was doing so because they had their credit cards
in hand, and were looking to buy precisely the kinds of products and services
you offer services. But of course this
isn’t the case.
Rather, most people use the Internet to get
information. That search for information
often takes the form of trying to answer questions that these individuals have
been unable to find answers for elsewhere.
So how do people tend to go about finding
answers to their questions? As you might
guess, these days most Internet users tend to rely upon search engines like
Google, Bing (Microsoft’s new search engine) and Yahoo. While most Internet users will have heard of
(and probably used) at least one of these three search engines, there are also
hundreds of other search engines available.
However, those other search engines generate far less traffic than the
big three (Google alone garners over 2/3 of the Internet search traffic), so
we’ll focus our attention on the big ones.
As you probably know, a person uses a search
engine like Google by typing a word or phrase into the search box. This specific word or phrase is the key to
your business success, because the word or phrase indicates exactly what that
person is looking for.
Let’s say, for example, that the individual is
interested in losing weight. If they
type the phrase “weight loss” into Google, the search results page will provide
two things, paid and organic search results.
Go ahead and Google “weight loss.”
Notice the yellow box at the top of the page,
and the narrow column that runs down the right side of the page. These are paid search results – companies
have paid Google to have their text (and links to their company websites)
displayed whenever someone searches on the term “weight loss”. Not surprisingly, you can see that these
companies appear to be selling weight loss and diet products and services.
The majority of the page displays the
so-called “organic” or search results.
This means that the Google search engine determined these web pages to
be most naturally (or “organically”) related to the phrase “weight loss”. The phrase “weight loss” is what we refer to
as a “keyword term”. You can see the
importance of the keyword term by the fact that the phrase “weight loss” is
highlighted throughout both the organic search results and the paid search
results.
In order to maximize your business
opportunities, you’ll need to research and identify the terms and phrases that
potential customers will use when they look for the kinds of products and
services you’re selling.
After identifying those keywords, you could
certainly launch a paid advertising campaign like the ones in the screenshot
above. This would be an easy way of
driving lots of relevant traffic to your website, right? Unfortunately, because of the level of
competition for the attention of prospective customers, it’s very easy for
beginning advertisers (and even some advertisers with more experience) to end
up spending a lot of money but have very little to show for it.
New web business owners will probably want to
wait to do paid advertising until they are more firmly established, and instead
focus on getting the best organic search results placement for their
website. You can do this by using
keyword research skills and optimizing your website accordingly.
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