Understanding Search Engines Part 2: Keywords

Search engines index web pages by deploying spiders to follow links from other web pages. During the indexing process the search engine also records relevant information pertaining to each page. Keywords are one such area and search engines judge the relevant keywords for a page in several different ways before supporting this decision throughout the indexing and ranking process. Choosing the right SEO keywords is an important part of any SEO campaign.

As soon as a spider begins the process of following a link they note the keywords used on the linking page as well as the keywords that are used directly in the anchor text of the link. Anchor text is the clickable section of the link that can be viewed by readers and search engines use the keywords that are found here because they believe that other pages will naturally link using the most relevant terms pertaining to the content matter of the resulting page.

A major aspect of SEO is building a strong and extensive profile of links to your pages using relevant SEO keywords as anchor text. These same keywords should also be used in the content, meta tags and title tags, and in various other places on the page. This reinforces to the search engines that a page really is relevant to that keyword giving it yet more weight in the search engine results. With good SEO this means that when people search using those keywords your pages will rank highly in the result pages.