Website SEO Texas – What are Keywords?

Website SEO

Keywords?

What are keywords? They are the words or phrases used by individuals to search and find the answers to their questions. These keywords are added to the search box of the search engine they are using. Then the search engine finds the pages on the Internet that are appropriate for the keywords used.

Search Engines

The three most common search engines used today are Google, Bing and Yahoo. (Soon Yahoo will be using Bing for its results). And over 75% of American searches are done on Google.

How to Use Keywords

So let's go through an example. Let's say we live in Dallas Texas. We want to find an Indian restaurant. And we are interested in Northern Indian cuisine. So we start by opening Google in our browser. We enter "Indian restaurant Dallas TX" into the search box and hit the enter key. Google finds 615,000 pages on the Internet.

That's great but we now have a lot of pages to review. And looking at the first page results, we could not find a northern Indian cuisine restaurant. So we changed our search to "Indian restaurant Dallas TX + northern Indian cuisine". Google then found 184,000 pages. But you can see that these are northern Indian cuisine restaurants.

Now if you owned a northern Indian restaurant in Dallas TX and were on the first page of results, we would have found you. And if you had an interesting menu, reasonable prices and directions to your restaurant we might have a meal there.

Some of the keywords to use for your northern Indian cuisine restaurant could be:

• Indian Restaurant in Dallas Texas
• Indian Restaurant in Dallas TX
• Northern Indian Cuisine in Dallas Texas
• Northern Indian Cuisine in Dallas TX

Your business needs to be found online and the keywords you use are essential to that process.

Content is King

On the Internet content is king. So the content on your website must relate to your keywords. And your content must be useful to the people doing the searching. Remember they will not only search using the terms above but also using the names of their favorite Indian dishes.

Some searchers will not be looking for a restaurant to eat in but rather looking for information about a dish they like. If your restaurant makes the dish, you should have useful information about that dish on your website. And the name of the dish should be a keyword you use.  If your have good content they the searcher may become a customer of yours.

How to Get The Right Keywords

To be found online you must use the right keywords. So how do you get the right keywords? You place yourself into the minds of your customers. What do they want and need? How would they search for your business and your products? If you have problems finding the right keywords, ask someone else what they would use. Ask you customers what terms they would associate with your business and/or products. Try the keywords to find out what results are found. Are these results appropriate for your business? If not drop the keyword.

To find the right keywords you need to think how someone else would search to find you and your products. Sometimes this is very difficult for the owner because they are so close to their business. So ask other people to help you if your are having problems. There is no magic pill to find the right keywords, there is only hard work.

Return to What is SEO.