SEO – The first step “Selecting Keywords”

You bet, selection of relevant keywords is the first step in SEO. Keywords are the red cells for SEO; these make us live a healthy life of the search engines. Relevant keyword research is needed and is essential as per best SEO practice. It will take you to the top or else will make you loose online visibility. Keyword research, unfortunately is left by the website owners for the end where as it must the first step when website design and development is being done.

What are keywords? Keywords are the words a web surfer uses to search for information. Your selection of keywords would revolve around your business niche. With proper keywords used in the website content and in every web conversation, the keywords would help the search engines to return your website when a web surfer conducts a web search.

When we conduct a search using keywords, the search engine looks through the indexed pages and picks up the most relevant pages i.e. the pages close to the keywords being used by us. Hence, we see the relevant search results on the SERPs.

Types of Keywords – Words that represent our market niche. These can be general keywords or more specific. Here we can also use long tail ends or keyword phrases that, we conclude after extensive keyword research, which would be the best for optimizing our web pages.

Keyword research and the proper use of relevant keywords bring the juice of SEO and help us to achieve top search engine ranking.

Use of keywords – Once we have made the choice of relevant keywords through thorough research, through the use of keyword research tools, the next step that we need to take is the proper use of keywords in the website content, the Meta Tags etc. If we opt for over use and keyword stuffing, we must be ready for the backlash from the search engines.

Selecting will always remain to be our first step and it should be done at the planning stage of our website, not when the website is complete and ready for being launched. We would need to rework a lot if we keep keyword research as the last step.