A Keyword By Any Other Name

It doesn’t matter what you call it, a keyword will always be . . . well, a key
word or phrase around which your Web site content is centralized. A single
word is sometimes not enough to narrow the possibilities for a Web site,
which is why some keywords are actually keyword phrases or keyphrases. It’s
the same concept — a centralized theme — just using more than one word. I
use the term keyword generically to mean both keywords and keyphrases.
Web crawlers are programs that travel around the Internet examining and categorizing
Web pages by keyword. That’s how search engines, like Google, know to
return your Web site when someone searches for a specific keyword or phrase.
The crawler has already had a look-see and has placed your Web page into a
category along with all the other sites on the Web that fit into that category.
Keyword marketing, then, is using that keyword or phrase to market your Web
site. Advertisements for a Web site, product, or service are designed using the
keyword or keyphrase as the “foundation” for the ads. Then, when Internet
users search for that keyword, the ads are displayed in the search results.
Google then takes this process one step further by placing ads on Web pages
that are built around — or optimized for — that keyword. So, whoever said a
picture is worth a thousand words didn’t realize the Internet would come along
and reduce that value to just one or two — three at the most.