A keyword is a term also known as a search word, search phrase, search term, or search query.
In the SEO world, keywords are those search words that Internet users enter into a search engine to get information about a specific topic or to find something else on the Web.
Search engines act on the World Wide Web as librarians in a large library. If you want to find something on the Internet, you have to provide some keywords to search engines like Bing, Google, or Yahoo, so they can find what you look for.
Why are keywords important?
Keywords are essential for all Internet users and for people who do any business online. They are vital for all physically existing businesses, even those who are not present on the Internet yet.
In the SEO world, keywords are well-known as some of the most significant ranking factors.
If you have a blog, own an online marketplace, a marketing agency, or other online business, you have probably heard about Search Engines optimization (SEO) and Search engine result pages(SERPs).
Keywords have many things in common with SEO and SERP, which are quite popular terms lately.
This is the reason why keywords are also popular.
Who needs Keywords?
When you start a business to make money, you need clients.
To have clients, they need to know about your business — a shop, a digital product, or something else. Regardless of your business presence is in the form of a website, app, shop, hotel or another local business. You need the people, your potential customers to know about it and be able to find about it.
Keywords or terms people use to search and find things online are important for you as a website owner or business owner because they are some of the keys to success.
As I said above, keywords are known as some of the most important ranking factors, and now I’ll explain what I mean.
Your business’ online existence is essential.
Without it, your potential clients won’t be able to find the goods or services you can provide for them. No online presence means no clients and hence, no business.
Let’s say you have a jewelry shop and a website that represents your physical jewelry shop online. The latter also offers possibilities for your visitors to buy various types of jewelry online. Let’s also assume that among your best selling pieces of jewelry are with rose diamonds and your most popular pieces are the rings- engagement rings and wedding rings.
In this case, some of the keywords you would like people to find you on the Internet probably will include “rings” and “diamonds,” which makes sense. This means the keywords essential for your website or online shop should include these keywords or search terms.
In reality, when someone who would like to buy a piece of jewelry most probably will not use only “diamond” or only “ring” as a search word. If the user types only “diamonds” or “rings” as a search query in the search engine’s text entry box, he or she will receive billions of results which are not useful, and/or not relevant.
Most probably users will use something more specific such as “a diamond ring,” “wedding rings,” or “an engagement ring.”
In our case, the search terms “a diamond ring” or “engagement rings” include more than one word and among the marketers and SEO pros, such keywords are known as long keywords or long-tail keywords.
Let’s now see how the search words work, and search engines work.
The Long-Tail Keywords
Keywords are essential for anyone who wants to find something and a key factor for those who want to be found online.
The long-tail keywords are specific keywords consisting of two or more search words or search terms. The long-tail keywords represent the “natural” way of users searching for things on the Internet. We can also say the long-tail keywords are a set of keywords people use when searching for something online.
With millions of search results on millions of websites, it’s not easy to find what you’re looking for quickly. Therefore, search engines try to judge the contents of websites and present in the first place those which are relevant.
Relevant results from a particular search include websites that have information related to the search keywords entered by the users.
Here is a diagram that illustrates how Google search engine works.
Most relevant content on a topic or search term (keyword) is classified by the search engine as most useful and hence, is positioned first in the search engine results (SERPs).In other words, every search engine tries to deliver the most relevant results based on a specific keyword or set of keywords entered by a user.
One of the important tasks of every site owner, SEO specialist, or SEO marketing agency is to take care of website optimization. Part of this optimization, known as on-site optimization is to find and utilize relevant and more specific keywords for the content of a website or single web page.
This is why you read in many articles about marketing and SEO the long-tail keywords have an essential role in the process of Search Engines Optimization.
Apart from the long-tail keywords, there is also another critical group of words which is equally important in terms of SEO. These words are known as LSI keywords or Latent Semantic Indexing keywords.
Long-tail keywords and LSI keywords naturally exist on every typical website.
LSI keywords and the Long tail keywords (LTK) and are the two most popular groups or categories of keywords that are important for website ranking. The content of a web site and a single page determines how a site or web page will perform during organic searches. Hence LSI and LTK are factors that may affect the positioning of a website in SERP.
Now it’s the time to say something about the Latent Semantic Indexing keywords. I will explain what is an LSI keyword and how this is different from a Long Tail Keyword?
Why Long Tail Keywords and LSI matter?
The more specific a search term, the easier it is for Google, Bing, Yahoo or another search engine to get ahead and bring visitors to your homepage. The more specific are the keywords, the more interested are the visitors and more likely is them to become customers or clients.
The long keywords (=long tail keywords) and the latent semantic indexing words are among the main reasons search engines can deliver adequate results to the end-users. These satisfactory results are popular as organic results or organic search results.
As I explained, the keywords, in general, are among the most important things for search engines and factors for website rankings. For this reason, the organic results, long-tail keywords, and LSI are significant for marketers, bloggers, companies, and everyone who uses the Internet.
In the above example with the jewelry shop as a business owner for you will be useful if your website qualifies for search terms such as “rings with rose diamonds” or “engagement rings with rose diamonds” and “engagement rings with rose diamonds.”
This is because if you use for your online business short/one-word keywords such as “diamonds”, you might end with many visitors, but not many customers.
Marketing is part of every business- big or small. As we all know, one of the ways to be found online by your future clientele is advertising.
Even if your website is not optimized for the right keywords, still you have good chances for your customers to find you, even if your business is brand new and nobody knows about it. This is where online advertising comes handy and in the right place.
If you want to understand why the first place in Google or any other search engine’s result pages matter, see the below results published on the site of SEO Profiler. These results show the relation between ranking position and how many clicks a link from the website receives as an average. The data includes only the websites which are on the first page of the search engine results (the first ten results in SERPs).
In short, if your website ranks higher in the SERPs, you get more clicks. As you can see, position number 1 gets well over one-third of all clicks, and similar data is collected by six independent sources.
Why is it important to be present on the first page of Google?
As I demonstrated above, to have a real benefit from your online presence, your brand or company must be present on the first page of the search results delivered from the search engine.
In an ideal world — in the first position, because this will surely bring to you (your online business) visitors.
Maybe customers? Maybe not.
If you can’t manage to get visitors to your website, you don’t even have a chance to earn money, so one way or another, you need visitors to your site first.
Online advertising and online marketing have one disadvantage. They cost money. Sometimes — lots of money, but this is life.
The paid marketing has one important advantage though — you don’t have to bother for natural (or organic) search results and if your site appears on the first page of SERPs.
If you pay- you will have visitors. Whether these visitors will later become clientele is a question depending on many factors, but without any visitors, there will be no clientele anyway.
Taking advantage of the organic search results on another hand means that your site is optimized. This process sometimes can involve a lot of resources — labor, time, and money. The SEO process(search engine optimization, or optimization for search engines) includes many things and one of the groups with significant importance in SEO as we said are the keywords.
Whether you get your visitors by paid advertising or by getting a higher position in organic search results in both cases, keyword research is essential.
Suitable Long tail keywords and LSI are one of the keys to success and bring the right visitors to your site or a particular webpage. The “right” visitors are those who have the highest potential to become your customers.
Whatever method you choose to bring visitors to your site — paid or free, the keywords and keywords research are among some of the most searched and discussed topics online nowadays, and there is a reason behind.
Originally published at https://www.websst.com.
