I often hear people asking “Are keywords really important?” Before Google’s Hummingbird update, keyword was indeed the king of online search. Some people are of the view that they are not so important anymore. But the truth is that keywords are still as relevant as they were before. The only thing that has changed is the method of implementation.
But before going into that, here is a short introduction to keywords. Keywords are the words and phrases that you type into the search box (of Google, Bing and other search engines) to find the information you are looking for. For example, if you are looking for photos of the wedding of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, you might type “Brangelina wedding photos” into the search box. That phrase becomes the keywords.
Keywords can be any words and phrases. They can be one word or several words. Putting the right keywords on your website can help search engines direct the users to your website. There are some keywords that are more popular than others. But while you may want to use popular keywords on your website to attract traffic, there may be hundreds of other websites who use the same keywords. This means that your website may not appear at the top of the search engine report page (SERP).
In the old day, implementing keywords meant researching popularly used keywords (related to your website) or even imagining some, placing them in the title tags and meta keyword tags and including them in your content (webpage). Not so anymore. The competition for popular keywords has become so tough that you won’t find much success without resorting to some clever (and acceptable) strategies.
So what has the Hummingbird upgrade changed? You can now type whole sentences and questions (search query) into the search box. For example, you can now type something like, “Where can I find the best Italian food in Toronto?” But it hasn’t eliminated the need for keywords, as some people erroneously believe. Rather, it examines the intent of your search query and may reword it before sending it to the index servers so that the best answers to your query can be found.
Once you type the query, Hummingbird breaks your sentence (in the example given above) and may rewrite it as “best Italian food Toronto”. If you have optimized your website for these keywords, then your website may appear on the first page of the SERP. The users can then access your website by clicking the given link. Other search engines like Bing have also implemented similar strategies to return search results.
While search engines have made it possible to ask entire questions (as discussed above), most internet users still use keywords to search for the information they are looking. It is easy to see why. If you can find the information you are looking for by typing just a few words or phrases, why should you type the whole sentence?
It is important to know what keywords your target customers are using to find you on the internet. Using the right keywords in your website dramatically increases your visibility on the internet. For this reason, keywords are really important.
Do you use keywords on your site?
Picture by Christian Cardenas