Understanding The Importance

When you go to a search engine and try to find something, you type in a word, or several words, and click the Search button. The search engine then looks in its index for those words.

Suppose that you used the words rodent racing. Generally speaking, the search engine will look for various things:
 Pages that contain the exact phrase rodent racing Pages that don’t have the phrase rodent racing, but do have the words rodent and racing in close proximity
 Pages that have the words rodent and racing somewhere, though not necessarily close together
 Pages with word stems; for instance, pages with the word rodent and the word race somewhere in the page
 Pages that have links pointing to them, in which the link text contains the phrase rodent racing
 Pages with links pointing to them with the link text containing the words rodent and racing, although not together

The process is actually a lot more complicated than this. The search engine doesn’t necessarily show pages in the order I just listed — all the pages with the exact phrase, then all the pages with the words in close proximity, and so on. Rather, when considering the order in which to rank pages, the search engine takes into consideration other characteristics of the keyword or keyword phrase:
 Is the keyword phrase found in bold text?
 In italic text?
 In bulleted lists?
 In text larger than most of the other text on the page?
 In heading text ( tags)?
 . . . and hundreds of other criteria, all of which are secret!

Despite all the various complications, however, one fact is of paramount importance: If a search engine can’t relate to your Web site the words that someone searches for, it has no reason to return your Web site as part of the search results.

Picking the right keywords is critical. As Woody Allen once said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” If you don’t play the game, you can’t win. And if you don’t choose the right keywords, you’re not even showing up to play the game.

Understanding how to search helps you understand the role of keywords. Check out the Bonus Chapter to find out the different ways you can search using the search engines in general and Google in particular.