A keyword is a word or phrase that resembles the main idea of the search, content, or website the most accurately. For example, if you had to explain what you are looking for or writing about with one or two words, you will be using keywords.
SEO professionals pay close attention to keywords since they determine how high they appear on the search results. Search engine crawlers scan the page’s text and decide what the page is about based on the words you use. The relevancy of the page to the user’s search inquiry is partly estimated by the keywords you use.
If you do not use the right keywords, you will never get the attention of either search engines or users.
At the same time, if you use too many of the right keywords, you may rank lower. Keyword stuffing is an SEO technique that does not work anymore since it was abused many times before. If there are too many keywords on the page, it is an indicator of poorly-written content that will not be pleasant to the user. Web crawlers know it and will ignore that low-quality page.
There are several rules of using keywords:
- distribute them across the page rather than stuffing one paragraph with them
- make sure that content was created for users first: it is easy and pleasant to read
- use keywords in a heading, title, description, and the first paragraph
- try AdWords, Google Trends, or competitor’s website to define the trending and relevant keywords
- do not use too general keywords
