05 Apr 09 SEO SIMPLIFIED: Basics of Keywords

Let’s start with defining keyword.  According to the University of Colorado:

A keyword is a significant word or phrase in the title, subject headings, contents notes, abstract, or text of a record in an online catalog or database which can be used as a search term in a free-text search to retrieve all the records containing it.

The above written technical definition was given to set the paradigm for this article and subsequent articles on keywords.  Moving further from it, let’s try to understand what a keyword exactly is and what it does.

When we talk about keyword in relation to the search engine then we do not only mean keywords, but we also mean key phrases.  Key phrases are the phrase we enter in the search box to fetch a desired result.

A search engine believes, which is also true, that one particular field can only have a limited number of related words, which a person will feed in the search box when he or she will require information on the subject.  Once you enter one of those words or phrases, the search engine spider crawls through the search engine’s data base of indexed pages and fetches the related information.

This basic list of keywords and key phrases for any subject or niche is not static, rather it evolves with time.  The length and the depth of the list will depend upon the search pattern of users searching for the keywords related information.  The search engine like Google keeps track of what you are entering in the search box and what links you are visiting from the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), and once the data for one keyword reaches a critical mass for any niche, let’s say for “Field-X”, this keyword gets associated with the “Field-X.”  This technique is also followed by the search engine to rank the relevancy and strength of a keyword or key phrase for the subject it is associated with.  There are three ways in which a keyword or key phrase can be used to search any information in a search engine and they are:

1. Broad match: keyword (no punctuation)

   Ex: If you search for “search engines” in broad match then SERP will have results matching these terms: search engines (the one you entered), search engine (singular of the keyword you entered), searches or engine (result based on one part of the keyword), etc.

If this mode is used for searching, the search engine will fetch not only the pages optimized for the keyword entered, but the search engine also fetches the pages optimized for similar keywords or for relevant variations of the keywords.

2. Phrase match: “keyword”

In this kind of search, the keyword is written between quotes, and this will fetch only the result matching this exact phrase.

3. Exact match: [keyword]

If you put the keyword within brackets while searching for it then you are doing an exact match search.  This will fetch results that have exclusive matches for the keywords with brackets.

With this, the article comes to an end; in the next article, on SEO Simplified, we will cover keyword research.

Tags: Critical Mass, Data Base, Free Text Search, google, Informat, Niche, Online Catalog, Paradigm, Phrase, Phrases, Relevancy, Search Box, Search Engine Result, Search Engine Spider, Search Pattern, Search Term, Spider Crawls, Subject Headings, Three Ways, Title Subject, University Of Colorado