Keywords How To – A Short Introduction -

What the heck are keywords and how are they used? This is a short keyword how-to that gives you the basics so you can understand how they work and why you use them.

So, What Exactly Are Keywords?

Most people know what keywords are, or have some idea, whether from being on the Internet, computer programming or offline when words or phrases are used as access codes, etc – more like passwords. Keywords are also used in computer languages as well. These are used as code to call specific functions absolutely unique to each. For example, “printf” is a keyword code that tells a program to display certain information associated with the code onto an output device, such as a printer or monitor screen. The above code belongs to a number of programming languages, such as C and C++.

There are many applications to keywords. We will be discussing the search function on the Internet and what it means to various folks. One of the reasons why I am writing this tutorial is that:

When I tried my hand at Internet marketing, I knew very well after awhile, how to build a website, but it was several years before I realized what keywords were and their importance. Putting the cart before the horse, I was creating websites without the campaign!
I have known many people to make this same mistake. It wasn’t until I joined an online business training community before I knew how to use keywords properly in campaigns. Do you REALLY know how keywords work? Myself, I never knew that there were numbers associated with keywords! It was quite an eye-opener for me!

Using Keywords to Search the Internet

A spin-off from programming came the concept of creating search engines for use to help find information on the Internet.

These are the formost metrics that search engines use to rank what’s searched on the Internet. The idea of using keywords (or “keyphrases” since most are made up of phrases, not single words) is to take advantage of these search engine metrics.

When you search for something on the Internet, you are asking the search engine you are using to find everything related (and hopefully relevant to what you are looking for) with that keyword or phrase in it and return the results for you in what’s called SERPs pages. This is an acronym for search engine results page.

The entire business of searching Internet is based on this metric and has been so since its dawning. Without it, it would be impossible to find anything, even in the Internet’s infancy. Over time, keywords have become more and more complex as the simple one-word searches have become so searched that you will almost always find online dictionary definition search results for the word.

A Bit About Keywords and Internet Marketing

Have you ever thought about building a website or learning how to market on the Internet? Better known perhaps as online publishing, you are essentially, broadcasting to the world as radio, television, periodicals, books, etc. As you are most likely aware, the Internet is one of today’s top forms of commerce. It’s also one which has the lowest cost of all media to begin, allowing most anyone to create a business, where scarcely 20 years ago, that was reserved for folks with big bucks to expend!

Reciprocating with the searching activities that goes on every day, folks with online businesses also rely heavily on keywords when creating content. Once learned, anyone can find excellent keywords to target and audience with! Today, this is much easier than ever before just by writing naturally!

Let’s look at a few simple parameters of a keyword and what to look for in it…

You need to start out with keyword research before you write content. Say you have chosen the niche of (let’s say, the Kindle, which is an electronic book storage and reader.) The first thing you will find when you search for “kindle” is that, at the time of this writing, it has about 129,000,000 results. Since this is a single word, rather, the name brand of a device, even putting it in quotes on the search bar isn’t going to do much for it. Putting quotes around your keyword will give exact matches of the term.

These results represent WAY too much competition for this term! 95% of the time, it’s probably referring to the reading device.

I get the exact same results. The more words within a keyword, the more of a drop in results you will get, BUT, you must enclose them in quotations or the results may actually get larger. I’m going to try the Kindle Fire, which is one of the models of the reader.

Without the quotes: 277,000,000 results. Why? A “broad” search brings up the words in any position on the page.
With the quotes: 54,200,000 results That’s much better, cutting out over half of the results, but still very high! (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1

In order to get a more accurate reading of how many results are actually there, we need to go to the last page of the search results. This will do two things…

Omit all of the duplicate content out there. Google hates duplicate content and effectively leaves them out of the search in addition to the less-relevant results. You are, however, given the option to conduct the search again with the omissions included. (Fig. 3) Even then, if this exceeds more than about 75 pages, it will not display any further. Let’s find out what we get here…

We get 191 results here! (Fig. 2)

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Note the discrepancy between the figures shown in Fig 2 and Fig 3. This is right within Google.

It takes time to find this more accurate number. Let’s see what keyword research tools can do for us! We will talk more about some of the other things shown on these images on the next page of this tutorial.

After adding the keyword (without the quotes) into my favourite keyword research tool, and the click of the “Search” button, in about three seconds, I did everything I had done above at the fraction of the time! This is just one great feature about these tools!

Note the figure here (QSR – or – “quoted search results”) is very close to Google’s relevant-search results! The reason for the slight difference between these is that this particular tool (Jaaxy) does far more than any other tool out there – and one of these is its feature of taking in data from ALL major search engines, not just Google!

Part 2 of this tutorial.

Comments

Kyle says

January 17, 2014 at 2:22 am

One thing most people don’t have access to is the precise competition when doing their research if. If you understand the QSR (or true competition) of a given keyword and you follow specific metrics (aim for under 300 QSR, the closer to 0 the better), you are going to have a very good chance of getting first page rankings in Google.

This is an excellent outline of how keyword research works and what sort of data you should be looking at when you are looking for quality keywords to target with your content marketing campaigns.

- Daniel Euergetes says
  
  January 17, 2014 at 8:55 pm
  
  Hey Kyle,
  
  Thanks for the kind comment 🙂 I will be comparing other keyword tools with Jaaxy to show how it is so easy to use and does so much more than any other. I particularly like its accuracy as it takes into account all major search engines, not just Google! That example came out pretty darned close however, off by one page! Awesome in my book! And to see where the discrepency is, it’s most likely Google as that’s only one search engine!