How to Choose Keywords for Your Website? Tips from Our Web Agency

If you run a business with a website, you will certainly have heard of keywords to use in your online texts, for example those of the company blog. These are the words for which you want your site to appear in users' search results.

The words people type online are called search queries, and through them the database of search engines such as Google is queried. Of course the database is truly enormous and the amount of information catalogued in it is almost infinite, which is why it is essential to identify the keywords best suited to your business and optimise them for SEO.

The first thing to understand is: how does the search engine choose the pages to show at the top of the results page? Until a few years ago the answer was: keyword stuffing, the constant repetition of a given keyword in a forced and unnatural way within the text. You have certainly come across pages written like this. Google has made this practice not only useless but harmful, penalising sites that continue to use it.

Today it is more correct to speak of keyword density, meaning not just the repetition of the same keyword, but the choice of synonyms and lexical variants in relation to the total number of words in a given text.

But ranking factors on Google (as well as on other search engines) are not limited to keywords: there are really a great many parameters, such as the authority of the source, the external links pointing to the page, shares on social media, the age of the domain, the page loading speed... we could go on forever!

For this reason we can say with certainty that filling a text with the base keyword is useless. It is much better to build a sensible text of sufficient length so that the search query is repeated within it harmoniously and without seeming forced. In any case, the rules remain valid that the main keyword should be placed in the title, in the meta tags and in the most relevant parts of the text.

As you will have understood, choosing the right keywords for your site is not simple, but once you understand how search engines work it becomes easier. As we have already said in previous articles, choosing keywords that are too generic is not advisable, because thousands and thousands of sites are trying to rank for that exact search query. It is better to focus on long-tail keywords, meaning whole search phrases rather than one or two words. This identifies a precise search intent and avoids attracting traffic from users who are looking for something else.

An example: if we type "pizza" and "sourdough pizza recipe" into Google we will get two very different results. The topic is the same, but in the second case the search intent is very specific, and if you write a text on the subject with that long-tail keyword, you will attract targeted traffic and not people looking for a takeaway pizzeria.

The topic is really rich and our marketing team will be happy to tell you more about it and help you rank your site correctly on search engines. Call our web agency for a consultation!