Keyword Search

I'm only standing on the long path of site promotion knowledge... Thousands of steps to be taken, millions of discoveries to be made... before I finally get to understand its basic things. Seems rather emphatic, right?

Yesterday, for instance, I got to know how important keyword search mechanisms are if you really want to make your site popular. Never before have I known that there could be so many nuances in keyword search. Well, probably it's not as complicated after all, but it's definitely not as simple as I thought. So I decided that it would be worth using the search engine of google and enter the phrase “keyword search” to get to know what “keyword search” means and how “keyword search” works.

So, what were the results of my keyword search for the the phrase “keyword search”?

The Spider's Apprentice explained to me the following.

Keyword search is the most common form of text search on the Web. Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords. Unless the author of the Web document specifies the keywords for her document, it's up to the search engine to determine them. Essentially, this means that search engines pull out and index words that appear to be significant. Since engines are software programs, not rational human beings, they work according to rules established by their creators for what words are usually important in a broad range of documents. The title of a page, for example, usually gives useful information about the subject of the page (if it doesn't, it should!). Words that are mentioned towards the beginning of a document (think of the "topic sentence" in a high school essay, where you lay out the subject you intend to discuss) are given more weight by most search engines. The same goes for words that are repeated several times throughout the document. Some search engines index every word on every page. Others index only part of the document. Full-text indexing systems generally pick up every word in the text except commonly occurring stop words such as "a," "an," "the," "is," "and," "or," and "www." Some of the search engines discriminate upper case from lower case; others store all words without reference to capitalization.

One more interesting thing. Keyword searches have a tough time distinguishing between words that are spelled the same way, but mean something different (i.e. hard cider, a hard stone, a hard exam, and the hard drive on your computer). This often results in hits that are completely irrelevant to your query. Some search engines also have trouble with so-called stemming -- i.e., if you enter the word "big," should they return a hit on the word, "bigger?" What about singular and plural words? What about verb tenses that differ from the word you entered by only an "s," or an "ed"?

Search engines also cannot return hits on keywords that mean the same, but are not actually entered in your query. A query on heart disease would not return a document that used the word "cardiac" instead of "heart."

Understandable, comprehensible, clear.

However, the main thing which should be remembered by anyone who is eager to promote their site is the following: design your webpages in such a way that the most relevant keywords are present in all the important locations and webpage elements. Keywords are really the keys to the site popularity.