Website 101: A New Website owner’s guide to the importance of Keywords

What are Keywords?

KEYWORDS are the WORDS YOUR CUSTOMERS USE TO FIND YOU (your product and your site).
Success depends on your ability to match these words with the keywords used on your website.
Know the words and phrases people will use to search for your products before you start building your site. Pick the wrong keywords – or worse let the web designer choose them and your site will fail for sure.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is your duty, regardless of whether you build your site yourself or if your engage a web designer. This work can only be done by someone with an understanding of your products and your market. Keyword research is one of the 3 main tasks you need to perform BEFORE starting work on your new site.

Your 3 basic tasks will be:
1) Plan the basic site layout – a broad view of the pages and links you will require
2) Identify the basic content you will use
3) Keyword research

After proper keyword research you will end up with a collection of keywords and phrases that need to be used throughout your site. If your web designer does not ask for these – get another designer.

Armed with your content and your keywords, the site designer can begin to develop the actual site. Make sure that your designer knows that you expect your keywords to be used liberally all over your site in these areas:

1) All relevant content pages
2) In navigation links
3) In the text descriptions (Alt tags) of any images used on your site
4) In page Titles
5) In hidden page content (Meta content) especially the page Description tag and page Keywords tag

Keywords in Practice

Keyword choice is a complex issue and one that a site owner must constantly work on. Ignore your keywords research and your site may well fail. In today’s online world, failure can be defined as being invisible on Google. This happens when you search for your own site using your keywords and you run out of patience clicking Next and hoping that your site will come up on the next page.
In practice you are dead online -if your site comes up in a search for your own keywords after the first 5 pages.

My next article will discuss how to do keyword research.