What Are Keywords?

What are keywords? This is a question anyone ever delving into SEO or SEM will undoubtedly ask themselves. Maybe they saw the term in an e-book, seo article, advertisement network or similar.

Keywords are popular or common search phrases people often use in search engines to find something they are looking for. A few examples; organic milk, home gardening tips, fishing lakes, blueberry muffins, free games online, diet tips that work.

All of those are examples of phrases or groups of words people often type

Searching For

into the search box at Google, Yahoo, and Bing to find “something” they are looking for. By targeting these words by means of SEO or SEM the webmaster will tap into that market share, and receive a percentage of traffic from persons looking for those terms.

So by using keywords from a list or reliable source a webmaster can better guarantee that his efforts will be rewarded either in search engine optimization or search engine marketing.

So how do I find these magical keywords you may be asking, well there are many companies that make it their business to sell keywords data. We plan to write a comprehensive guide to the top keyword tools in the next few weeks so stay tuned.

Google Keywords Tool

Most of these cost money, but some (Google Adwords) have free utilities. There utilities are free because they are counting on you using their Adwords Advertising System to market those words. I would suggest using Adwords for Advertising as well. By far the largest market base.

Hope this puts a face to things, good luck and we’ll see you around the search engines.

Side Note: Here is a cool little keyword utility we would like to promote as well. It’s called Keyword Thesaurus and generates thousands of keywords. Compete.com also has an awesome tool for finding out keywords.

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