A Complete Guide to Keyword Research
Like all site owners, you must also have the desire to see your website ranked high on Google’s pages. This is because you realize the importance of page ranking. However, you must also be breaking your head trying to figure out why your page cannot be found at the prime spot. You need to first understand how search engines function. There are several tricks in search engine optimization, though it may sound too complex for your understanding. It is important to remember that there are no short cuts to diverting large volume of traffic to your site, which is the primary goal of every website owner.
To understand search engine optimization and what happens behind the scenes, you need to dig deeper and probe a bit harder to learn. You need to be prepared to put in some hard work and understand the mechanics of search engine optimization. A search engine as such is made up of three important bits of software and those are the spider, the index, and the query software. Once you understand what these three are and how they work, you can consider yourself to be really knowledgeable about the intricacies of search engine optimization.
Spider Software
The spider software probably got its name because of the similar way in which it crawls back and forth and up and down, across the web, hunting for any new pages that have appeared in order to add them to the search engine’s data base or the indices. In reality though, there is no physical crawling that takes place, nor does the ‘spider’ visit any website. On the contrary, it asks for pages of any site just as any browser like Firefox or Explorer would. All that the spider specifically looks for are the text links and the URL that carry the content and images. As the spider does not recognize images, you need to have an ‘alt tag’ identify your images and log.
Index Software
The index software is built to take and store everything the spider brings its way. This software uses an algorithm, which is a formula based on mathematics that helps in indexing the phrases and sets of words to make sense. The algorithm is built to assess word combinations found on the pages of the websites to find out what the web pages are trying to convey. Based on this information, scores are allocated to help the search engine decide the relevancy of the web pages and how important they could be to the searcher. Every search engine has its own set of algorithms that are safeguarded, however, all algorithms use the information collected by their spiders.
Query Software
The query software is there for everyone to see. It is what you find on the page of a search engine. It is the job of the query software to collect all the results generated by the behind-the-scenes spider and index software, and present it to the searcher. Whenever you type in a search word or phrase, the search engine gets to work and locates the web pages that best match your search word. Instead of directly going to the web and wasting time on an elaborate search, the query software turns to the data stored in the index software, which in turn has been gathered meticulously by the spider.
Now you should have a fair idea about how search engines work. However, without proper input, all the information stored will be of no use as it cannot be pulled up. Unless a proper search word in entered in the search box, no information will come forth. This is a major reason why search engine optimizers take pains to know the words that are used by most people when they search for anything. These words have been termed keywords, as they play a key role in a search operation. It is important to use keywords in your text, or the copy that fills up your website. This helps in attracting traffic from popular search engines like Google and Bing. Any online business needs a steady stream of traffic on which its very existence depends.
Normally, it is the most commonly used words that end up being keywords. For instance, for a chocolate manufacturer or seller, the keyword itself could be either chocolate or cocoa. While the keyword chocolate could attract more traffic, the keyword cocoa also attracts quite a lot of traffic. Similarly, a shoe seller could either use ‘shoes’ as his keyword or he could try using footwear which again attracts equal number of responses. While the keyword ‘shoes’ could be used by almost all marketing companies, ‘footwear ‘will probably be used only by a few.
Keyword research involves a lot of patience and collection of data after extensive research in the market. While you may not be able to make an exact prediction based on keyword research, you can give an idea about the general trend in the market. For instance, while the keyword ‘shoes’ may produce more results than ‘footwear’, you could experiment using new combinations of keywords like ‘fashion shoes’ or ‘durable shoes’ in order to make searches unique, thus diverting them to specific destinations.
Author Bio:
This is a guest post by Ethan Millers of bw9.com, a site that offers savings and current information on the best cable and internet providers.
Category: SEO
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