What are Keywords to Web Publishers

Keywords are important words in a page. These words bring traffic to a website via search engines. Keywords are words that internet surfers usually enter in search engine search-bars when they searching for information on the internet. Writing for the internet is all about keywords. To succeed as a web publisher, you must identify keywords relevant to your industry and provide contents targeted at those keywords.

Most people depend on search engines when searching for information online. This means that if a search engine does not index your website or your website is not ranking high on search engines, you will get very little traffic to your website. Having your website indexed is easy, but ranking high on search engines is a tough task.

For your website to rank high, your pages must be purposeful. The easiest way of writing purposeful pages is to target keywords that people who are searching for information contained in your page would enter in a search engine search-bar.

Search engines use keyword index to predict what your web page is about. Keyword index of a word in a page is the ratio of the frequency of that word to the total number of words in a page. Keyword index of between 0.02 (2.0%) and 0.06 (6.0%) are recognised by search engines. Therefore, when targeting keywords ensure that your keyword of interest is within this range.

Keywords are very important to web publishers. You cannot make money as a web publisher if you do not target popular keywords in your industry. Each page on your website should target one keyword.

Now we will go through the different keyword types that web publishers come across.

Raw Keywords

Raw keywords are your first keywords. Raw keywords are keywords that you generate with common sense. It is a guess and is unrefined. You should not base your pages on raw keywords. Raw keywords should be generated before writing each page, but should be analysed to find more refined keywords that are relevant. Before you start any website, you must first generate raw keywords relevant to your industry.

You can generate raw keywords by yourself or with the help of friends and colleagues. For example if you intend to launch a website that provide information on cars, some of your raw keywords may include:

• Car


• Toyota
• 
  
• Toyota Corolla


• Car reviews


• Car specs

Raw keywords are raw materials and should be researched on to find out those that are relevant.

Relevant Keywords

Relevant keywords are refined keywords. They are the result of keyword analysis on your raw keywords. Relevant keywords are words that people actually enter in search bars when searching for information online. You identify relevant keyword by using a keyword analysis tool like Google Insights, which will give ideas of your relevant keywords.

Simply enter each of your raw keyword in a keyword analysis tool like Google Insights and the tool will reveal how searchers use such a keyword. For example, entering the raw keyword Car may reveal relevant keywords like:

• Cars


• Car insurance
• 
  
• used cars


• Car reviews


• Car hire

These are the keywords you should actually target when writing copies on your website. You can also do a further keyword analysis on all these keywords to discover keywords that are more refined.

Active Keywords

Active keywords are words that actually bring visitors to your website. You can look up your active keywords in your keyword log. You can use a tool like Google Analytics to lookup your active keywords. Active keywords give you an idea of what visitors to your website are looking for. With this information, you can determine if you are satisfying their needs.

Compare your active keywords with your relevant keywords. If they match each other, it means you are doing very well. If there is a huge disparity then you still have a lot of work ahead of you. However, note that it takes time before you can properly rank high on your relevant keywords.

Google webmaster tool provides you with a list of keywords that brings the most visitors to your website on Google search. Improve your targeting on these keywords.

Potential Active Keywords

Potential active keywords are keywords that your website appears on, but because it is ranking low, they are not bringing visitors to your website. Let us say, your website is number 50 on the keyword Nokia. That is good news but you will notice that because your website appears on the 5th page your website will not get visitors to your website via this keyword.

Google webmaster tools gives you two lists of keywords the first are words in which your website appear the most on Google search (list A). The second list is a list of the top 20 keywords that bring visitors to your site (list B/active keywords).

List A are keywords that if you rank high on them will bring you more traffic, while list B are those that are currently bringing you traffic. Compare your list A and list B if they match then you are doing very well. Keywords that appear on list A but do not appear on list B are your potential active keywords. You should research on why you are not performing well on these keywords. When you discover the problem, solve it and more visitors will be coming to your website.

Note that you should not be happy just because list A and B matches, you should look at the placement of each keyword in the two lists. For example, if a keyword appears in number 1 position on list A but on number 3 position on list B it means that you still have some work to do. The ideal is that keywords in the two lists should also match in position.

Popular Keywords

Popular keywords are words that are popular in your industry. You should write web copies covering these keywords. However, you must note that it takes quite a long time before you can start getting result on popular keywords. Therefore, you must see targeting popular keywords as a medium to long term investment.

One way of getting results immediately from popular keywords is to target them with identifiers. While it will be hard to get results targeting the keyword cars, targeting the keyword Toyota cars Chicago will be less difficult. In this case, the identifiers are Toyota and Chicago. Targeting longer keywords like this can help you get results immediately. However, do not forget that your major keyword is cars.

Emerging Keywords

Emerging keywords are keywords that may become popular in a few weeks, months or years. As a web publisher, you must constantly monitor trends in your industry to identify emerging trends. Target emerging keywords on time and you will get results. Targeting keywords early can increase your chances of topping search ranking on those keywords.

Making money from web publishing is about how properly you can target keywords in your industry.