What Are Keywords?

Date First Published: 6th November 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Easy

Difficulty Level: 3/10

CONTENTS

Types Of Keywords
Stop Words

Learn more about what keywords are this article.

In SEO, keywords are words or phrases that describe the content of webpages to search engines. Keywords make it possible for someone to find a page in SERPs as without any, search engines would be unable to understand the content of webpages and deliver results relevant to the searcher's query and it would make SEO impossible. All webpages found in search engines contain some form of keywords. These could be in the title, description, headings, page content, or alt attributes. For example, the title of this article 'What Are Keywords', uses keywords. Website owners optimise their pages to rank for certain keywords relevant to their page content so that when searchers type search queries, their website can easily come up, increasing organic website traffic.

Website owners should always ensure that the keywords on their title and description are relevant, descriptive, and not vague so that when people click on the search result, they find what they are looking for and are not misled. They should also include their keywords in their URLs and in a <h1> tag on their page, which will help search engines know what the content is actually about.

This information is used when ranking and indexing a page in the search results and is an essential part of on-page SEO. The main keyword should be used in the meta title in the head of the HTML document, which is the most important meta tag for SEO as it is used by search engine algorithms to decide the order when listing pages in the search results based on whether the searcher's query matches the title.

Note:

The value that a page offers to users as well as the structure and readability is more important than a high keyword density. When using keywords, it is never recommended to add an unnecessarily large amount to manipulate the ranking of a page in the search results, which is known as keyword stuffing.

Types Of Keywords

Keywords come in two types, which are short-tail and long-tail.

Short-tail keyword - Also known as head keywords, these are short and general keywords of 1-2 words that cover a wide topic that has a high search frequency and very high competition (e.g. 'coffee shops'). A lot of websites, especially new websites with no backlinks, struggle to rank for short-tail keywords as they are far too competitive and they could be competing against large businesses that have gained hundreds or even thousands of backlinks over years.
Long-tail keyword - A highly specific phrase of 3+ words that often has a relatively low search frequency and competition level (e.g. 'organic coffee shops near me'). It is recommended to focus on long-tail keywords as it is easier for a website to rank higher for them due to less competition.

Stop Words

Stop words are words that search engines automatically filter out when retrieving results as part of a search query. Stop words are usually articles, prepositions, pronouns, or conjunctions that do not add any meaning to the search query because they are very commonly used and are only used to structure sentences properly. For example, when searching 'How do I stay safe online', the stop words are 'How', 'Do', and 'I'. By removing it, 'Stay safe online' the question sounds odd but the meaning of the search query does not overall change.

Even though stop words should not be removed from content, titles, or headings as this can make sentences sound odd and create a bad user experience, using them will have no effect on how high a page ranks in the search results. These words can still be seen, but they are dropped when indexed and ignored when performing a search in order to speed up the crawling and indexing to save storage space.