Designing Websites Around Keywords
Why is it important to design around keywords?
Keyword research is all about forcing the search engines to find your website. The vast majority of people who search on the internet do so using search engines like Google or Yahoo!, and you therefore need to make these search engines find your site as often as possible. If you don't do this you will be losing thousands of potential customers.
Although things are rapidly changing, the search engines are still overwhelmingly text based. In other words, they read the words on the page, and to a large extent they ignore graphics and video.
However, Google in particular is very keen on ranking video materials as well. This is indicative of another important factor about the search engines, which is that they are constantly adapting their practices to match ever-changing markets.
At this moment, however, search engines are overwhelmingly text based search tools, so Flash or Shockwave videos on your site count for nothing with the engines. This despite the fact that your human visitors may love them!
All the major search engines use ‘algorithms’ to decide how highly they will rate any website that they analyze. Such algorithms are essentially programs (spiders) that can 'read' the words on your page, and then index that particular page based upon what these words tell them the page is about, and how they value it.
A properly constructed webpage will be focused on a
particular keyword or keyword phrase. Making sure that this happens is the concern of those who are involved in the art of ‘search engine optimization’ (SEO).
The first step in the SEO process is to find the keywords or phrases that are going to be most effective for driving targeted traffic to the webpage in question.
Secondly, the webpage will be
constructed around that particular keyword or phrase in order to make sure that the search engine ‘spiders’ realize that this is the phrase you want to be ranked for.
Keyword research must therefore be the most fundamental and vital ingredient of creating a webpage that the search engines will visit, analyze and hopefully love.
When a search engine spider visits your page, it is looking for the most important terms you are using, so that whenever any web searcher types the same term into the search box, the engine shows them your site page. In this way, the search engine helps to send targeted visitors to your site.
It is, therefore, extremely important to use the correct and most appropriate keyword term when building your webpage. Do this, and over time you will be able to drive an increasing number of targeted visitors to your site, and if you are selling a product or service, then you will
inevitably increase sales at the same time.
