Keywords – A Key Component to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Part I

In a number of my previous posts I used the term “keywords” and I did so for good reason – they play an absolutely critical role in all your online marketing efforts.  Yet, until you know what keywords are it’s pretty tough to incorporate them into a search engine optimization strategy, much less tactically employ them in a manner that will drive business to your door.  So let’s start by defining what keywords are…

In the simplest terms, keywords are words that people will use when searching for your products or services.  For example, a business in the Chicago area looking for accounting services may type the following phrase into a search engine: “Best Chicago Accounting Firm.” Each word in the phrase, “Best Chicago Accounting Firm” is a keyword.  Now clearly, if you’re our hypothetical Chicago Accounting Firm you wouldn’t use any of those keywords by themselves because it wouldn’t make sense.  No one is going to do a search using only one of those terms – at least not anyone looking for an accounting firm in the Chicago area.   So we use terms “Long-tail keyword” or “Short-tail keyword” to describe the type of keyword “phrase” we’re talking about.  True to the description of each term, Long-tail keywords are longer search phrases and Short-tail keywords are shorter phrases.  Each type of keyword traditionally provides different benefits, results, and traffic, but I’ll post more about keywords and how they directly relate to search engine optimization in my next post.  Stay tuned.