A choice that makes or breaks a marketing campaign

What are keywords?

Search engines use algorithms, or mathematical formulas to gauge the quality of a website. Of the various elements that make up a high-quality site, unique content is king. Notice I said "unique" content as opposed to copied, or poorly constructed content. Why? Because content that is original, clear, concise and can't be found anywhere else delivers fresh, new information. This is what the search engines are looking for. Within this new information lies the keywords or keyword phrases that identify the core subject of the message. These are strategically placed within the title tags, headings, and body of the web page in an optimal fashion to compliment, or to put it more precisely - to satisfy the algorithm's requirements.

Identifying the right words

Before selecting what these keywords will be, it is imperative to do a competitive analysis to determine the most viable words for your given industry or subject matter. Choosing too broad a term can sink your site's chances of placing well in the search results right at the outset. For example, if your site's primary objective is to sell organic weight loss items to people with diabetes, choosing the keyword, "weight loss" will most assuredly be a lesson in futility? Why? Because a search for "weight loss" returns a result of over 66 million possibilities. Alternatively, a search for "organic weight loss for diabetic's" returns only 920,000 possibilities. Get the picture? 

Long-tail vs. Short-tail terms

Our weight loss scenario is a good example of short-tail and long-tail keyword phrases. It signifies the number of words used in the search term. Where "weight loss" is a short-tail phrase (using only two words), "organic weight loss for diabetic's" is a long-tail phrase. As you can see, the latter more precisely targets your market by narrowing the search down to a specific audience. This is used to also target geographic markets and defined demographic audiences. For example, "houston weight loss" returns 1,620,000 possibilities versus the short-tail term, "weight loss" with its 66 million. Defined even further to target a specific demographic, we could use "houston weight loss for the elderly." This narrows our search down even further to 773,000. If your website is used to target this audience, your chances of placing high in the search results is dramatically improved.

Latent Semantic Indexing

Latent semantic indexing (LSI) adds another important layer to the search engine indexing process. In addition to identifying and then recording which keywords a web page contains, LSI examines the content collection as a whole, to see which other sources contain those same words. LSI considers pages that have several words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant. This simple method correlates surprisingly well with how a human being, looking at content, might classify a web page. Although the LSI algorithm doesn't understand what the words actually mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem extremely intelligent.

When you do a search, the search engine looks at the similarity values it has calculated for every word, and then returns the pages that it thinks best fits the request. Because two pages may be semantically similar even if they do not share a specific keyword, it does not require an exact match to return highly accurate results. Where an ordinary keyword search might fail where there is no exact match, LSI will often return relevant pages that don't even contain the keyword at all. A simple example of LSI for the keyword "pasta" might include:

• penne
• spaghetti
• sauce
• angel hair
• noodles
• el dente

As you can see, the keyword "pasta" is nowhere to be found in this list. However, LSI knows that pasta is implied as the subject matter for the inquiry. This same process is what makes professional SEO copywriting such an invaluable service. A good SEO copywriter knows how to correctly construct web page content which precisely employs latent semantics within the fabric of the material.