Keywords are a venerable institution on the web. Long ago, when AOL was one of the lone pioneers (along with Compuserve – remember them?), they catalogued websites by using keywords. At first, you told AOL what you wanted your keyword to be; later, they sold keywords to you. That keyword, whether it was roses or dogs or computer software, was the most important search method on the Internet.

Then Alta Vista, the webs first search engine, came along. It catalogued pages by the phrases it found in the metatags in the header of the web address . (Metatags are places you can put keywords and descriptive phrases and not have them show up on the web address itself.) This worked pretty well for a while

Then human found out you could abuse the metatags. Webmasters who ran adult sites would simply look for the most popular search terms online and put them in the metatags. No matter that dolphin, cooking equipment, and running shoes had little or nothing to do with the content on their pages – theyd use them simply because it caused their rankings in search engines to go up.

This was the birth of keywords as we understand them.

Keywords and Keyword Phrases

Keywords and keyword phrases are words and/or phrases the search engines look for when they catalog your page. Search engines only work if they might return relevant content to the human who are using them to search, so its very much in their interest to find articles that go well with the search terms humans insert in the search box.

Search engines look for keywords in several places:

* In the metatags at the start of a web page * Within the header tags of a web address * In the body of text on a web address , especially in the first paragraph and the last paragraph

If your address is about cooking, for instance, you want to look for keywords like cooking, recipes, utensils, ingredients, etc. to trigger the search engines to properly catalog the internet site . And you want to put in enough keywords that the search engine will understand that this is an important page on that topic, not just mentioning the keyword; yet not so many keywords that your content is unreadable for the humans who browse to it. Most keyword article writers think between 3% and 7% of your words being keywords or keyword phrases is optimal.

If you have trouble doing this yourself, you might always look at purchasing private label rights articles. These are articles produced in bulk about topics you might share with customers visiting your web site. When you purchase private label rights articles, theyre already keyword optimized, and you have the option of modifying them in any way you please. Its also an inexpensive way of grasping dazzling content on your website .

Even specially-optimized keyword articles arent perfect, though. You might optimize content, only to find that your internet page is not ranking high at all with the keywords you want. There are several other variables that might affect search engines (though the exact recipe they use to determine where your web site falls is a closely-guarded secret, and it changes periodically anyway).

How Search Engines Work

Search engines make use of a text-based algorithm to determine where your internet site falls in their rankings, part of which depends on the keywords you use, where in your document you generate make use of of them, and how theyre used. But they look at keywords in another place as well: the links that connect to your site.

If youve participated in link exchanges with other webmasters or if youve donated articles to article directories, search engines will observe and record these links. If your main keyword is not in these links, youve wasted your time developing the links and the content. But if your keyword is included in the links in some way, it will strengthen your web sites relationship with that keyword.

This is one of the most powerful search engine tools you have. Use it.

In addition, search engines check to see if youve updated your content recently, and whether the content youre making available is very similar or the identical as content on another page. Frequent updates will raise your search engine ranking. Content that looks like another page, whether youve been plagiarized or not, might lower your ranking or eliminate it entirely. Private label rights articles are a incredibly workable way to maintain a bank of continually-fresh content for your address thats pre-optimized. Even if you like to write content yourself, its good to have a few around for heavy times like Christmas season, when you might run out of your own articles.

And thats really about all there is to it.

One More Thing

When you optimize your web page for the search engines, be certain you retain its ease of use for persons , too. Thats who its written for. And a number 1 rated page, no matter how content-rich or how hard youve worked to improve its ranking, is definately worthless if your viewers look at it and then click away.

Cody Moya writes about Article Marketing in his free of cost 50 parts course on Internet Marketing. You may sign up for his Free Internet Marketing Course and get additional data at his internet site : http://www.marketing.us