Keywords are possibly the most misunderstood aspect of search engine optimisation. They play a major role in drawing traffic to a site, yet they are frequently under- or over-used, stuffed into content like tinsel on a tree, pulled out of content with garish and illogical font schemes, and generally abused. They are the most common accessories to spam, the crime of the SEO world. They are pushed around, stomped on and given a hard time, which is a shame because they are just words like any other.

Most of the problems stem from the perception that, in search engine optimisation, keywords are a tool. They certainly are a tool, and a valuable one at that, but the title ‘tool’ conjures up images of solid metal shapes that can be used to hammer the world into place. Keywords are much more delicate than that image indicates. They may be a handy spanner as far as your SEO is concerned, but that spanner is made out of marshmallow.

Consider the function of keywords in titles. Keywords are vital in titles as the latter are given more weight by the search engines than general content. It is also a generally held rule that the further to the left keywords can be placed in a title, the better. This means that the ideal title needs to have the main keyword at the very beginning, with other keywords listed in order of importance. The trouble is, this often results in titles that can barely be graced with that name. How many times have you seen something like ‘bicycles bikes bicycle helmets bicycle gloves kids bikes bicycle sale’ listed high in the search engine results pages? The answer is probably rarely, and only for certain industries, because search engines hate a bare list of keywords as much as human internet users do.

A similar problem occurs with keyword placement in text. Many sites hammer their keywords into their content any old how, resulting in clunky, near-illiterate language. This kind of low-quality content will result in a lowering of ranking, rather than a boost, as search engines take quality into account over time. Sites that use automatic content generators achieve the same undesirable result. The best move when you don’t have quality writers on staff can be to consult your SEO firm, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about content provision.

Keyword formatting is another source of confusion. A little research will show you that formatting important terms with bold, italics, capitals and so on will result in the search engines giving more weight to that term. Unfortunately, this can result in text with KEYWORDS that look plain silly. The formatting doesn’t serve to enhance the text and fails to follow any logic, as well as over-saturating the content. Just as squeezing your keywords into content, this can ultimately lower your ranking.

The English language is a beautiful and adaptable thing. It can only be pushed so far, however. Use your keywords delicately when you want good SEO results.

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