SEO Foundations for Small Business Owners by Eli Davis - HTML preview

Keywords and Keyword Research

Keywords are the phrases that people type in the search bar of their browsers when looking for something particular on the Internet. To optimize for such phrases, you can use them in various parts of your website. This includes the following:

• you text content (product descriptions, blog posts, marketing texts, etc);
• the URLs of your web pages (the “address” that you can see in the address bar of your browser);
• the <alt> tags used for images;
• title and meta description elements in the HTML code of your page (don’t worry, we’ll detail on these a bit later).

In the past, SEO specialists were notorious for overstuffing texts with keywords. Even a couple of years ago it wasn’t uncommon to see something like this:

Thank goodness, those dark times of SEO are long gone. The keyword-related SEO techniques became subtler thanks to the fact that search engine algorithms got extremely sophisticated. This means you no longer have to cram your web pages with dozens of weird-looking phrases – instead, you should strive for a natural feel when working on your content.

This also means you need to invest more time and effort into ke word research if you want your website (and your business) to succeed. Ideally, you should build a huge list of keywords associated with your business or product and sieve out the ones that are less likely to bring you customers. Read on to learn about the SEO tips, as well as the tools that can help you do this.