How to Add Keywords to a Website for People and Search Engines

When you consider how to add keywords to a website, you have to ask the question, who are the keywords for? Adding keywords to a website is all about optimization. That’s a big word that’s used all over the internet marketing world and almost always is preceded by the words “Search Engine” so that when we hear about optimization, we regularly think about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. But what is optimization and is there more to it than just optimizing for Google, Bing and Yahoo?  When we consider how to add keywords to a website, I think we have to pull back a little to see a larger picture.

Optimization:

Noun: An act, process, or methodology of making something as fully perfect, functional or effective as possible.

So you add keywords to your website so that your website can be as perfect, functional or effective as you need it to be in your internet marketing strategy. A well optimized website is designed to attract, convert, close and delight the people that find it. They find it because they are searching for something that you offer and you have keyworded your site for that item. 

Did you know there are over 2 billion Google searches performed daily? Because search engines are such powerful tools, of course we choose keywords that make us findable.

2 billion searches on Google alone! That is a LOT of web activity and you know as well as I do that you want to attract visitors to your website who want what you are offering. Let’s face it, you could keyword your website brilliantly for chocolate chip cookies, but if you don’t actually sell chocolate chip cookies then you are misleading your audience just to get them there. Incidentally, this has been a tried and true strategy of porn sites to pull people in and it works for them, but it is bad business and as Google gets “smarter” the consequences of this approach are getting stronger. You, of course, would never resort to such tactics but people do. Just this morning I was looking for some software to extract a .rar file and the links I found gave me all kinds of software that did everything except that! Crazy making. If I want something specific, I just get mad when the link takes me somewhere irrelevant, don’t you?

Here are a couple of blogs on strategies and tools you can use as you consider keywording your website:

How to Add Keywords to a Website Without Looking Like a Chump

How to Add Keywords to a Website and a Few of My Favorite Things

Don’t forget the real people out there in internet marketing land

When you consider how to add keywords to a website, remember that you are keywording your site for both the search engines AND for people. To keyword your website for your desired customer, you need to spend some time creating buyer personas. Who is your ideal client? What are the challenges they are trying to solve that you can help with? What is their job role? What questions are they asking that your product or service can answer? What is their typical usage pattern on the internet?

I find one good way to get the answers to this is to ask people outside your company and industry how they would research on the internet if they needed your product or service. The way they think might surprise you and affect the kinds of keywords you research.

At some point we’ll have to get further into developing buyer personas, but that is another blog post for another day. For now, the key takeaway is please, please, please, make sure you keyword your website in a way that is not deceptive or misleading.