Keywords (or phrases) are the words that define your website and your keyword strategy is the most important thing to get right at the outset.

Keywords are extremely simple. There is nothing remotely complicated about keywords – yet, bizarrely, to a beginner, the concept of keywords can be a little confusing.

Let’s use the Harry Potter example again. The theme of the web site is Harry Potter Movies Cast. This is our first keyword for this site: “Harry Potter Movies Cast”. (It is sometime called a keyword phrase but more often than not, a phrase is referred to as a keyword despite it having several words in it.) “Harry” and “Potter” and “Harry Potter” are not keywords – they are excluded because of tough competition. We can add more keywords. “Rupert Grint” and “Emma Watson” might be good but at first, let’s stick to a single keyword. Remember, it has been selected because we think that there is an acceptable level of competition for that keyword i.e. there are not too many other sites found by Google when we search on those terms.

Optimizing Your Site

Keywords are used to optimize a website for search engines. This means that the keywords will be strategically placed within the content of the website to increase the ranking of our pages in search results. There are a simple set of rules to follow when chossing where to place keywords

• Place them in the title
• Include them in headings (betwen <h1>, <h2>,<h3> tags)
• Include them within the body text
• Include the keyword as often as you can as long as it is natural
• Do not repeat keywords in an unnatural way

If you create a page according to these rules, your page will rank highly in the Google search results – perhaps not page 1 or page 2 – there are other things that will need to be done to further optimize the site.

The SEO Lesson

You have established what your website’s purpose is. You understand what search engines do and the importance of relevance. You have selected a niche where there is demand but not too competitive and now you have seleced a keyword and you understand how to apply it to get your website found.

This is the basis of all SEO activity but to be really successful at getting noticed on the World Wide Web, you have to start getting a little more scientific. That is what Fundamentals Lesson 5 is about.