Keywords, Keywords and More Keywords

Imagine you were a search engine called Google. How would you know if a particular web site was relevant to any particular subject? Think about this for a moment ... one way is to look for a certain word or phrase called a keyword or keyword phrase AND then assess the importance of that single keyword relative to any other word on the web page. This is exactly what Google and most other search engines do and apparently in the blink of an eye.

IMPORTANT NOTE ... When I talk about Google I could also be talking about most other search engines.

Google is the best and we must work with the best to become better and better I mean sell more and more. Google is now responsible ( July 2005) for a reported 70% to 80% of all Internet search results.

Introducing Keywords In Search Engine Terms

A keyword is not necessarily a single word. In fact a single word keyword finds little practical use on the Internet today. Take the word fountain and do a Google search. Chances are you will not find what you want.

For example did you mean?

• Water fountain

• Drinking fountain

• Garden fountain

• Classical fountain

• Roman Fountain

Fountain as a keyword is too broad. If you really meant you wanted information on garden fountains then a better search would have been to use the complete phrase garden fountain. Note that I have used inverted commas deliberately. Try this:

Go to Google and type garden fountain (no inverted commas) and look at the search results as of this days date (not the date you may be doing it) 370,000 SERPs.

Now go to Google and type garden fountain with inverted commas. This is what you would have got on the day I did it in 2003 - 5,920 SERPs. For the fun of it also go to Google and type garden fountains 7,680 SERPs. Finally do a Google search for Garden Fountains ie use of capital letters same as above 7,680 SERPs.

Lets take a closer look at what we got to help to understand this concept of keywords as far as search engines are concerned.

The first thing to understand when you type garden fountain without inverted commas is that you get a lot more results than when you typed the same phrase with inverted commas. Why?

The answer applies to most search engines. Simply typing two words like garden fountain tells Google to find all web pages that contain both the word garden and fountain on the same page it does not matter what order the words are in or even if they are far apart on the page.. They do not need to be next to each other.

On the other hand typing garden fountain means Google will only find those pages that contain the two words exactly as you typed them and there are always far less SERPs under these circumstances. Not only this the leading SERPs using inverted commas tend to be the leading SERPs without inverted commas but not always. This has major implications for us later.

The second important point is that typing garden fountain might bring up results that have no relevance to fountains in gardens. For example a page which read at the bottom of the garden was a drinking fountain would be a returned result for garden fountain with no inverted commas.

A third point is that in the past on Google (not all other search engines) the plural of a word was NOT the same as the singular. In practice this meant you needed a web page for a single term like fountain and one for fountains ie 2 web pages. Today Google search engines does word stemming meaning they treat the singular form the same as the plural form in many cases BUT not always.

One other point and again some search engines behave differently. Capital letters in Google are compressed to lower case ie it does not matter whether you type in capitals or not.

Now of course most people who search the Internet do not know the differences but the ones who really are looking seriously do know it these are people who want to buy and who know what they really want. These people will and do use inverted commas for example in their searches. To narrow search results right down sophisticated searchers might use the phrase brass garden fountain. Lets try a search for this and see how much competition there is.

My goodness, can you believe it? only 11 competitors!

There are only 11 web site in the whole of Googles 8 billion web page database seriously competing for brass garden fountain.

Finding the keywords real people use every day is one of the challenges that face REAL web designers ie those designers who offer their clients not just a web site but a web site that produces the desired results SALES.

Keywords and keyphrases continued