Before we start our discussion on keywords, let me (for the benefit of those who don’t know it) define what we mean by ‘Keyword’ in the field of search engine optimization.

‘Keyword’ (in SEO terms) is used to define a word or a phrase (referred to as ‘Key phrase’ too) that relates very closely to the webpage in question. Keywords are the group of words and phrases that can clearly indicate the content of the webpage in question.

Every search engine (be it Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine) identifies each webpage through that webpage’s keywords. Keywords are used by these search engines to index webpages. So for each keyword or a group of keywords, the search engines prepare a mapping of relevant websites in their database. Whenever you make a search on a search engine, search engines try to look for the keywords in their database. Here, the keywords that the search engines look for are actually the words that you enter in the ‘search box’ of the search engine (the search engines generally ignore the words like is, it, the etc unless they form a key part of a key phrase).

Generally, the search engines will find a number of websites in their database that map to the set of keywords derived from your search text. The next job that the search engine does is to list the results (the websites) that it has found to be most relevant to your search text. In case the keywords / key phrases are very uncommon, the search engines might come up with only a few results (or even no results) but sometimes a large number of websites are found for the same set of keywords. When displaying the results to the user, the search engines order the results as per the relevance of website to the searched text. However, if many websites are at the same relevance level, the search engines will check the ranking of the website (web pages) for ordering the results (i.e. deciding which website / webpage will be placed above the others). Better page ranking will mean better placement of the webpage / website among the hundreds of websites that were found by the search engines. Besides this, there are several other mechanisms that search engines use for ordering the results.

So, finding the right keywords for your webpages is the first and one of the most important things.

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