What is SEO? What are Keywords?

Recently I was answering someone in a Facebook Group for bloggers. She was wondering why she was not getting any traffic from Google despite doing SEO.

I had a look and found the problem right away.

She had learnt all the basics of setting up for Search Engine Optimization (meta tags, headers, alt images...). They are listed in many articles.

But in her learning process she had missed a critical step: She had no idea about what the real purpose of SEO and Keywords were.

So for her articles, she just picked a single word that was central to the article e.g. "sick" as a keyword and did everything around it... for nothing.

Not her fault, most articles forget to give you context to properly apply the advice, they forget beginners.

If you see the problem with her choice of keyword, no need to go further. But if you are a beginner and would have done the same, let's go through it together.

What is a Web Search Engine

A Search Engine for the Web...

...is a program that analyses and indexes web pages so that it can match them as best as possible to queries by the user.

A Query can be...

a series of word: "Best NFL Player" or "How to knit a scarf"
an image: by recognizing what is on the image and providing relevant information
And in the future, who knows?

Example of Search Engines

The first ones we think of: Google, Bing, Firefox, Safari are all search engines
Youtube is also a search engine on top of a video host - if you search for a terms it displays what it believes are the best answers to your queries
Pinterest is also one - you type a term or phrase and it displays the Pins that he thinks will link to article answering your query

What is SEO

What is Search Engine Optimization

Each search engine has its own criteria and process to decide how well a page can answer a query.

So Search Engine Optimization consists is setting up your website and article to fulfill those criteria.

SEO varies for each Search Engine.

Google Example

Google has the most advanced system and it is introduced in the video below:

What are Keywords

Clarifying what Keywords are

An SEO Keyword is a potential query typed in by the user.

Once you use it for SEO it is called a keyword

Example of Keywords

For an article talking about the ranking of NFL basketball players your keyword could be

Basketball or
Basketball players or
NFL Basket Players
NFL players
NFL players ranking
...

All those are potential keywords you could use to optimize your post but not all are good Keywords.

A good Keyword has:

a lot of people searching it every months... so that you have a chance of people looking for your article
not a lot of websites answering well the query and fulfilling the criteria of the search engine... so that you have a fighting chance to be at the top of the answers for that query