Do you know your website’s keywords? Infact, what are keywords and how should you use them? These are good questions and the answers are important for you to know as a webmaster and website marketeer.

Keywords are words or phrases that people search for on google or their favourite search engine. For example, if you typed ’search engine optimisation’ into google, any page that contained the words ’search’, ‘engine’ or ’optimisation’ would appear in the search results, all 5 million of them, but you will see the first page. There are more available but most people only look at the first page.

And the first page of results are sites that ‘rank’ highly for those keywords and deserve(according to google’s ranking algorithm) to be on the first page of results. Of course, the ranking algorithm google uses is kept secret.

But if you don’t know the keywords you want each page of your website to be ranked for, you don’t stand much chance of getting onto the first page, or any results page for that matter, and missing all that free traffic.

The keyword topic is part of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, a big subject in it’s own right and one I will be discussing in later posts. But it all starts with knowing your keywords.

For each page on your site choose a primary keyword and maybe 2 or 3 secondary keywords. For example, if your primary keyword is italian cooking, your secondary keywords might be italian cuisine and italian pasta. So your page should be about italian cooking and your keywords be on the page.

You can help improve your ranking by including your primary keyword in the title tag (the bar at the top of your browser window), in the main heading (between <h1> tags) and in the first few paragraphs. And don’t forget to add it to the ‘alt’ text of your images too.

But how do you choose the right keywords? Do you let the content you write select them for you and then hope that people are searching for those keywords? Or, do you find out what people are searching for; what’s popular, and then write about those topics?

Well, you can do both. Choose and write your content, then using a keyword tool, find out what people are searching for on that topic, and edit your content to include those keywords. So you can get the best of both worlds.

And how do you find the keywords people are searching for? keyword tools are the answer and there are many to choose from. Good keywords is an excellent tool, available as a free download, so you run it from your PC. Or you can try nichebot, which is a paid, web-based keyword service combining several tools into one.