If you know, go check out the Battlestar Galactica season 3 finale. It's totally far-out. Otherwise here's a nice tight little explanation of this very mysterious, bizarre world.
In order for people to find your site in Google or other search engines, the search engine has to match what they enter with content in your site, and with links that go from other people's sites to yours. If somebody enters "cheap computer parts vancouver bc," sites that have other sites linking to them using those words or combinations of words will show up higher in search engine results than sites that don't have those kinds of incoming links. So search engines use websites' links to each-other to judge their value in terms of different keywords and keyphrases. And of course, search engines bring up sites that have text in the pages that corresponds to what's being entered in the search.
So that means that if you're trying to make a site do better with Google, or you're writing content for a site and want to make sure it gets its due recognition and traffic online, it's pretty damn critical to figure out what people are going to type in when they're looking for what you've got.
It's kind of like reverse-engineering the process of sitting down and going "okay, I know what I'm looking for, now what do I type into this search engine to find it?" and you try a few things, and hopefully you find what you're looking for.
Keyword Research is an act of bridge-building. You're making a connection between your site's content and the search terms that people will enter in order to find that kind of content. When I was doing keyword research for Ocean Island, which is the youth hostel I worked at, it was a matter of brainstorming what people would enter to find a hip, interesting and cheap-as-fuck place to stay in Victoria.
There's many ways to go about figuring out what keywords are gonna be looked up, and they're all useful.
- First off it's good to sit down and just think "what would I enter if I was looking for what I've got?"
- Then go and ask a couple other people. Now you have a few keywords to start off with.
- Try doing some searches and make note of the words you see repeatedly in the results. They might give you some more ideas.
- Try the free trial of wordtracker. It can help you make a list of good keywords and phrases.
I'll get into that a bit more in a future article, I've got craploads of layout work to do before I pass out, but basically, you want to pick keywords that aren't already oversaturated on the internet. If you can find "niche-y" keywords that are still popular enough to generate traffic, that's the ticket.
How to find these keywords, and the best ways to use them, are a topic for future reading! But I recommend reading up on it, it's totally fascinating.
