Keywords are important words or phrases in the text of a site. If someone searches on Google for "set up a website", and your site contains that keyword, then your site is likely to be shown to that person in the search results, because Google believes your site is relevant to that keyword.
You want to show up higher on the list of Google search results for keywords that are very relevant to the content of your website. For this to happen, you first need to realistically choose what your important keywords will be.
When someone searches in Google, the order of the search results isn't just determined by Page Rank. It's also determined by how relevant a site is, to what the user searched for.
To work out what a site is about, Google will look at page text, paragraph headers, page titles, page descriptions, words in the website address and domain name, and the text of links on other sites that go to a site.
By choosing those words and titles carefully, you can make your page very relevant to certain keywords. If you're selling something, it's very valuable to be highly ranked for keywords that are searched for by people who want to buy something. For example, "buy web hosting" or "cheap web design London" would be excellent keywords to rank highly for.
It's a good idea to use lots of variations of your site's major keywords, in the text of your site, so that you show up in the search results for many different keywords.
It's also a good idea to pick one or more keywords that you're going to heavily focus your site on.
So, you should pick a keyword that lots of people search for, right?
Not exactly.
When searching in Google, the searcher will click on the first result (the one at the top of the list), more than 40% of the time. This drops to 12% for the second result, and has fallen to 3% by the time you get to the bottom of the page. Few people click onto the second page of results. For the site that's 20th on the list (at the bottom of the second page), they'll only be getting visited by 0.3% of searchers. Beyond the second page, the sites will get very few visitors indeed.
When choosing what keyword to focus your site on, you want to pick a popular keyword that people search for, but it's far more important to choose a keyword that you can get to #1 for.
Think of a term, and then type it into Google. Look at the size and quality of the sites, and ask yourself "could I beat these guys, and get to #1?" If you can't beat all of them, you need to choose a more obscure term.
Here's an example from this site. When setting up this site, I could have chosen a number of keywords. Here are the five options I considered:
Keyword |
Searches/month |
What's the top 10 comprised of? |
|---|---|---|
make a website |
368,000 | Large companies. |
create a website |
201,000 | Large companies. |
build a website |
110,000 | Large companies. A few web design tutorials from major sites. |
design a website |
33,100 | Medium-sized web design firms. The Wikipedia page about web design. |
set up a website |
12,100 | A few tutorials from smaller sites. |
For searches for "make a website" and "create a website", I would've had trouble getting into the top 50, and getting to #1 would've been impossible. Of that juicy total of 386,000 visitors per month, I wouldn't have even got one thousandth of it.
However, by choosing "set up a website", I'm already well on my way to getting to #1 for that keyword, whereupon I'll likely receive around 5,000 (40%) of those 12,000 visitors per month. (Plus more from a variety of other keywords, of course.)
For your site, choose a keyword you can beat out everyone - and get to #1 - for. Choose something very obscure, if you have to. Always err well on the safe side. With three times less clicks than first place, getting to #2 is a poor second prize.
You can use the Google Keyword Tool to see the number of searches per month that are performed for various keywords.