Basically, keywords capture the essence of your web site. Keywords are what a potential visitor to your site puts into a search engine to find web sites related to a specific subject, and the keywords that you choose will be used throughout your optimization process. As a small-business owner, you will want your web site to be readily visible when those search engine results come back.
Using the correct keywords in your web-site content can mean the difference in whether you come back in search engine results as one of the first 20 web sites (which is optimum) or buried under other web sites several pages into the results (which means hundreds of results were returned before your site). Studies show that searchers rarely go past the second page of search results when looking for something online.
If you’re going to maintain a web site with the best search engine optimization possible, you will have to be familiar with “heuristics.” This is simply a term for recognizing a pattern and being able to solve a problem or come to a conclusion quickly and efficiently by consulting what you already know about that particular pattern. In other words, using heuristics is a way to solve a problem, although it’s not always the most accurate way. Heuristics are important in search engine optimization because they allow for variations in the way that users search for a particular keyword or keyphrase. Because a combination of factors must come together to create a ranking for your web site, heuristics make it possible for some, but not all, of those factors to be present.
