SEO South Africa - Internet Marketing

Understanding Keywords and SEO Search Engine Optimisation

What are keywords and search queries?
Search queries are a combination of words that internet users type into search engines in order to find information and websites that are relative to the information/product/service that they are looking for.

These queries contain keywords that help the search engines filter information and return relevant information back to the user.

A Search Query / Keyword Example:
An example of this may be entering “Flyer Printing Company in the city of Cape Town”. The search engine may filter out words like “the”, “city”, “in” “of” and “company” and be left with the keywords “flyer printing cape town”. It then matches those words to websites that have content that contain the keywords “flyers”, “printing”,” Cape Town” and then lists those websites on the results page.

Of course there may be many companies that have those keywords, so the search engines take it one step further and place websites that are more important for those keywords at the top of the search result list.

The more important the site is rated amongst other websites that also contain those keywords, the higher it will appear in the list. Generally websites that have more link backs (sites linking to them) get rated higher than sites that have fewer other websites linking to them. Older sites are also likely to have a higher rating.

This is the basis for (SEO) search engine optimisation, selecting keywords and making sure that you appear as high in the list as possible for queries that relate to your products and services.

Competition:
It is often the case that there is a lot of competition on search engines with well established companies making it very difficult for new websites to compete on the most obvious queries e.g “Printing”, so we recommend focusing on more specific queries for example “Printing Cape Town”. This cuts out all the competition for keywords relating to the entire country or world’s printing services and may give your company a better chance of getting traffic from people who are actually going to use your services in the area. An even better focus may be “Digital Printing Cape Town” as this is even more specific.

Why constant monitoring is important:
With all the tools that we have it is possible to find additional keywords that users are actually typing in to find you. It’s often the case that business owners think that users understand their products and the slang/terminology surrounding them and make the mistake of thinking that the users will type in these words when searching. Usually they are entering in completely different search queries and the only way to identify these other words is by tracking the user behavior over time. From that data one can gather new keywords and capitalise on those words that other competitors may not yet be using, giving you the edge.

How are keywords implemented?
We use a combination of written content (words that are on your site) and behind the scenes coding techniques to “gain the attention” of the search engines. It is a never-ending challenge to try to keep up with changes in rating techniques that the search engines are using as well as with the ever increasing competition online, we therefore try our best to stay up-to-date at all times with the latest trends in search engine marketing (SEM).

Want help?
If you are keen to move up in the search results please contact us.