Keyword Research

There is a lot of buzz around at the moment about keyword research. But what is it exactly, and why should we be doing it for our website content?

Firstly, I will do my best to give you a short history lesson. Just like in Flickr there are words associated with the image that help to describe the content or subject matter of the image. Google and other search engines use these ‘keywords’ to classify websites across the web. In the old days, keywords were predominantly used in the meta fields of the website, until Google found that website owners were putting in anything and everything as a keyword in their website data to gain higher search engine ranking.

To stop this misuse of the meta keyword system, Google changed the way it determined the keywords of a website, effectively implementing another system to work alongside the website meta system. Google robots started analysing the content of the website looking for patterns. By reading the copy, the filenames of images, and descriptions, the search engine company found it could give more accurate results for the end user.

This is where keyword research comes into the picture for you, as we all know we use the internet to research and discover stuff or to entertain. Generally, we all start at the same place, the search bar. We type in a few words, or a sentence that best describes what we are looking for.  Search engines track these entries and rank them for popularity then they are placed accordingly in a general search reference matrix, relevant to each market, industry, geo-location, device type, and so on…..

Keyword research is the study of this data and diagnosing of these search terms that are relevant to your industry or market, so you can find the best words to implement into your content; therefore your content should help give you a better search ranking! 

To help simplify your life, we have put a keyword research tool into the post and page editor interface on our hosted website platform. This way you can do your research while you write, and make sure you are getting effective SEO from your posts.