Make it Relevant
In the world of bricks and mortar retail shopping the location of a shop is quite often the key to its success if it’s going to benefit from passing footfall. Similarly some types of businesses such as factories and distribution centres, understand it is essential to locate themselves close to a motorway junction in order to keep their deliveries flowing freely.
However when it comes to trading online, many of these real-world concepts fall by the way side as Google places little importance on where a business is located when considering how to rank its website in its search results. What is important however are “keywords” and “relevancy”.
To understand what this means and why it is important for your own website; it is helpful to try and understand why Google is so popular as a search engine and why in only a few short years, it has come to dominate the web as the search engine of choice for most people over the old stalwarts of Yahoo and MSN.
Back in the mid 1990’s before Google came along, when a search phrase was typed into one of the popular search engines of the day the results that were presented were often poorly related to the search phrase being used. This resulted in the searcher having to trawl through pages and pages of irrelevant results before they actually found a web site that was worth looking at.
Then along came Google who use a different method of measuring the importance of a web site to a particular search term and as a consequence, began to deliver meaningful results to people who use its search engine. Word quickly spread about this new search engine that actually presented ‘useful search results’ and subsequently Google rapidly became so popular that today approximately 87% of all searches made on the web are done through Google.
So what does this mean to you as a web site owner? Well quite simply, you need to make sure that your web site is relevant to its subject matter and contains text with relevant “keyword phrases” that are important to your customers. So for example if your business sells or makes “plumbing equipment” then you need to make sure that the text on your pages contains phrases or terminology that are centred on this basic concept, as these are the phrases that your customers are likely to use when searching for your business.
In this instance, such phrases as “pvc pipe fittings” or “radiator valves” might be some of the important “keyword phrases” to use across your website. Time spent identifying what these phrases and then re-writing the normal text on your web site’s pages to include them, is time well spent and will make it easier to get your site ranked in Google. To help you, use Google’s own Keyword Generator Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to help you identify phrases that are relevant to your business and its website.
Jaimie Dobson is a director of Heckmondwike based digital marketing agency Keyclicks UK Ltd
Note: This original article by Jaimie Dobson was orignally published in the Business Matters section of The Weekly Press Newspaper on the 22nd August 2008
Tags: dewsbury weekly press, search engine keywords and relavancy, The weekly press newspaper
