what is a keyword and its types - keywords basic guide

In digital marketing, keyword is used to find some information while searching on web. You need to know the types and seo of keywords. Selecting the best keywords enable you to drive qualified traffic from search engines to your website.

Keyword Definition

What is a keyword?

A keyword or a keyphrase is a word used to find information when researching. In digital marketing, a keyword is a particular word or phrase describing the topic of a webpage. Internet users use the keywords as a search query to perform a search in a search engine. Keywords form the part of a (web) page's metadata and help the search engines to match a page with an appropriate search query.

What is the Google keyword?

Google keywords are words or phrases that can get your ad in front of right customers. Google keywords will help you to find the most relevant and high quality keywords for your business.

What are keyword phrases?

A combination of two or more words, used by advertisers or visitors who want to find information based on particular phrase.

To attract the right visitors to your website, you need to use keyword phrases instead of using just single keywords. You must select a strong keyword phrase, if you want to get your content recognized by search engines.

Should keywords be single words?

It's better to focus on attaining good rankings for keyword phrases that are between 2 and 5 words long.

Meta Keywords

What are meta keywords?

These are specific type of meta tag that appear in the webpage HTML code. Each keyword should accurately reflect the content of your page, so make sure to select appropriate meta keywords.

Are Meta keywords important?

As Google has confirmed that they don't use the meta keywords tag as factor in website ranking, but meta tags still play a great role in website SEO. With the help of these keywords, search engine summarized idea about your website.

How many meta keywords should I use?

Character limits for page title is 70 characters, meta descriptions should be upto 160 characters and keyword phrases not more than 10.

What is meta tag used for?

Meta elements are used typically to specify page description, keywords, author of the document, last modified date, and other metadata. The meta elements (metadata) can be used by browsers (how to display content or reload page), search engines (keywords), or other web services.

Keyword Types

What are the types of keywords?

Some major keyword types are: short-tail keywords, mid-tail keywords, long-tail keywords, branded keywords, primary keywords, secondary keywords and geo-targeted keywords.

What are short tail keywords?

Short-tail keywords also known as generic keywords, are popular search terms that have a very high volume of search traffic. These terms contain usually one or two words and they are very competitive to rank for. Short-tail keywords refer to more commonly used words.

Characteristics: high search volume, strong competition, no clear search intent

Example: running shoes

What are mid-tail keywords?

These keywords fall between short-tail keywords, which have a high volume of traffic but are highly competitive, and long-tail keywords, which have a small volume of traffic but with less competition and higher conversion rates. These terms are usually two to three words and are slightly more descriptive than short-tail keywords.

Characteristics: slightly more description that short-tail keywords

Example: running shoes in black

What are long tail keywords?

Long tail keywords are the longest search terms, may be included three or four keyword phrases which are very much specific to topic or item. Whenever you use a long tail keyword, actually you are looking for exactly what you want to buy.

Focusing on long tail keywords is one of a great SEO tactic.  Long tail keywords get less search traffic but usually have a higher conversion value because they are more specific.

If you know exactly what are searching for or have some very specific request in mind, then use long-tail keywords.

Characteristics: less search traffic, higher conversion value

Example: nike best running shoes in black

What is the best source of long-tail keywords?

Google autocomplete is the best source of long-tail keywords. Google gets a huge number of searches every day. The most relevant and popular of them appear in their autocomplete.

What are Branded Keywords?

Search phrases that include a brand’s name or its variations are referred to branded keywords. These may include brand name only or the brand name along with a product type or product name.

Characteristics: more specific

Example: Apple, IBM, Nike

What are primary keywords?

It is used to describe the site and help people to locate the site. so it should be included in a site's title and web address as well as in its content. It should be added to the first sentence on the page as well. Primary keywords are used in all the important places in your website. It should directly signify the product or service that you are trying to promote or sell. 

Example: running shoes

What are secondary keywords?

A secondary keyword is used after the main keyword and are highly relevant to your primary keywords. It increases the chances of attracting additional visitors to your site.

Example: top running shoes

What are Geo-Targeted Keywords?

These search phrases usually identify a location. Best suited for small business that relies on local customers. Those who use these terms are looking for results that are near them or in another area. Geographic SEO based on keywords and directories helps ensure that your business is reaching the right web audiences within your target city.

Example: middleton running shoes 

Keyword Density

What is keyword density?

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase used in a web page compared to the total number of words on the page.

How do I check keyword density?

To calculate keyword density simply divide the number of times you used a specific keyword by the total number of words used in webpage or post and multiply the result by 100 to achieve your percentage.

So if in an article, there are 100 words and you are using your keyword 10 times, your density will be 10%. There are different formulas to calculate keyword density.

What is a good keyword density percentage?

There is no ideal or fixed percentage for better ranking. According to some SEO experts 1-3% of keyword density works good. Again, there is no ideal percentage, and google also suggests to write natural articles, so placing your keyword in natural places will work the best.

What is a keyword density checker?

This tool help with the measurement in percentage of the number of times a keyword or phrase used with compared to the total number of words in a web page. Maintaining proper keyword density can be helpful in the search engine optimization process to determine the relevance of a web page for a keyword or key phrase.

Organic Keywords

What is an organic keyword?

An organic keyword is a keyword used to attract additional free traffic through search engine optimization (SEO). Organic keywords in a website are the keywords which bring traffic for your site organically. Organic traffic is the type of traffic that you get without paying for any ads. You receive this traffic majorly from SEO. But you can also get organic traffic by using social media.

Organic keywords are free

Organic search is a search that is actually not a paid ad. So organic keywords or keyphrases are search terms yielding non-paid traffic.

Organic keywords appear naturally on our website and that contribute to the ranking in the search engine result pages (SERPs). If we promote those organic keywords, we can improve the ranking of the website without unnecessarily spending our money on PPC campaigns.

How do I create organic keywords?

There are some key areas where your keywords need to appear to help you rank organically for relevant searches.

- The URL or web address

- The title and H1 tags
- The first sentence or at least the first paragraph
- Subheadings
- Image file names and alt text.
- The meta description.
- In links to related content.

How can you rank your keywords organically?

- Firstly do Local SEO

- Then go for the Global SEO.

- Don't use the most popular keywords, use the less popular keyword.

- Move away from the commercial keywords.

- Use keywords that have monthly searches of 500 - 1,000

- Use keywords in a ratio of 100…If you write an article of 700 words then use at

   least 7 times your focus keyword.

- Use many keyword modifiers.

- Mix up your on page optimization.

- Use that keyword in Meta tags and Description

- Then start making backlinks on relevant sites