What is a Keyword?
TweetKeywords are the heart and soul of Internet marketing. The first step in promoting a site will be to start to brainstorm what the keywords are going to be that you will focus on. But, if you are just getting started with online promotion you might be asking "What exactly is a keyword?"
Definition
For the main page of your site the keywords will be the terms and phrases that best describe what your business, site, product, or service is about. It is what the users will type into a search engine to find you. They are the terms that you are going to pay to show up for in the results while running your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns.
Keywords are more than just a single word. I use the term to cover any phrase or combination of words that are used by the searcher.
Brand Names
Unless you are a major brand, your keywords will not be your company name. People are more interested in the services or solutions that you provide than what you are called. So for example Amazon.com might be big enough now to get enough people to search for them on their name alone, but early on they wanted to rank their home page for the keywords of "online shopping" or "online books."
How Many Keywords Per Site?
A site can have many different keywords. Again using Amazon as an example you will see that each individual page of their site is optimized for separate keywords for that specific page. If you search for an individual product, it almost doesn't matter what kind of product it is anymore, Amazon will show up in the search results. The product pages of their site are targeting the keywords you are searching for related to that product. How many keywords to target for your site depends on how many resources you have.
How Do You Use Keywords?
In the old days people use to "stuff" their keywords into their content in order to try to rank high in the search engines for those terms. This is a big no-no these days as you want your content to read naturally and to give the searcher exactly what they are looking for.
Today, what you want to do is include your keywords in the title and the meta description of the page. Not only does the title tell the search engine spiders what your page is about, but when your page shows up in the search engine results they will bold the keywords in both your title and the description when displaying you along with the other pages. That bolding will draw the attention of the searcher to your page and increase your click through rate.
The other way to use keywords is in getting links to your site. When someone links to your site the words or phrases they highlight when giving the link is called anchor text. That is a strong signal to the search engines telling them the keywords of your page.