Search engines analyse the words on a web page, in order to learn what the page is about.
They do this by using bots (AKA crawlers).
Having found a web page or blog entry, say on a gardening website, the bot will ‘read’ the content, look at the SEO meta data and decide that this page is all about lawn care.
It will file the page amongst the millions of pages that it has found on this subject.
On this basis, ‘lawn care’ would be a keyword phrase, containing two words: lawn + care
Luckily for the website owner, ‘lawn’ is clear.
People think of the word lawn and associate it with a grass-covered area, probably within a garden.
The word ‘care’ has many other associations, besides lawns.
Therefore the website owner would need to think of synonyms such as:
lawn maintenance, lawn upkeep, lawn repair, looking after my lawn
They could use this website: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/synonym
It is a good idea to have an up-to-date list of keywords.
Include the name of your enterprise, brand names, products, services and geographical places that you operate in.
Think about the phrases that your target markets are likely to use within the search engines and include these in the list.
As this list is meant for you, organise it in alphabetical order.
Print it out and keep it somewhere where you can see it.
When you are writing content for your website, refer to your keywords list.
As time goes by, refer to Google Analytics and use the information there to refine your keywords list.
Nigel offers SEO consultancy and SEO training.
