Keywords.

What is a keyword? For internet and SEO purposes, a keyword is a word or phrase that searchers put into a search engine search box when they are looking for information. Search engines are the fishing lines that dangled the bait for the fish to catch. The search engines choose where your bait will be dangled.

Our objective in search engine optimisation is to find niche keywords that can get top positioning in the organic search area of the search engine results pages so that we will find visitors to come to our website. This table and graph demonstrate the importance of top positioning. It has been shown that approximately 40% of visitors to a search engine results page will click on the web page in position number one. The 10th page on this search engine results page will receive only 2.8% of visitors, and by the time we get to see the webpage in position. 41, less than 0.1% will attend the website.

If you plan to seek visitors from the search engines, the fact is that your web page, must appear at the top of the search engine results pages.

From a search engine optimisation point of view, webpages should be built around just a few keywords. Some say, one keyword only but it seems acceptable to have two or three keywords, provided they are closely linked. From an SEO point of view, we can consider three types of webpages.

The first involves the pages that are essential for the theme of our website. Here are the competition for the keywords involved is likely to be extremely strong, and probably too strong for top positioning to be achieved. These pages are unlikely to attract new visitors unless your website is mature and has significant PageRank.

The second set of pages, are theme pages, whereby chance, the competition's strength is low. In practice, there are unlikely to be many of these.

Finally, we have webpages that are specifically designed around niche keywords. You should endeavour to make each and every one of your webpages as attractive as possible for your visitors and also for the search engines.

The first set of webpages from an SEO point of view are those that are essential for the theme of your website. This is an extremely attractive web page on the subject of 'Italy', but it does not feature even in the top 60 positions on Google. An attractive webpage such as this may demonstrate authority and provide interest for those visitors, who arrive on the website through other keyword searches. In the long run as the search engines recognise the authority of the website and increase PageRank, so these pages may attract visitors in their own right. But this will take time.

The keyword, 'Italy' has a very high degree of keyword difficulty. The competition is extremely fierce. Top positioning would therefore be unlikely. My program Keyword SEO Pro looks at keyword difficulty. It concentrates on PageRank of HomePages. Google tells us that its view on the importance of a webpage is indicated by PageRank, and it is the PageRank of the HomePage of the website that matters.

Keyword SEO Pro shows us that the averaged PageRank of the HomePages of the top 10 pages on Google is 7.3 and the lowest PageRank of this set of results in 6. The number one position is 'Italian tourism.com', which is the website of the Italian government tourist board. If they can only achieved a PageRank of 6, you will see how difficult it is to you to compete for this keyword. Top positioning is therefore unlikely, and any page tht you produce on the keyword 'Italy' is by itself unlikely to attract new visitors.

The second set of webpages, from an SEO point of view, are important theme pages, where the keywords involved have relatively low competition strength. Keyword SEO Pro is only two examples of keywords, where the average HomePage and ranks of 4.5 and 4.0 and there are examples of webpages with PageRanks of 0 and 2 so that successful competition for our webpages here may be feasible.

The third and final set of webpages on a website from an SEO point of view, are those that are built around niche keywords. Niche keywords and of the keyword research to find them will be discussed in another video.