In this video, Gwen Beren, CEO of Illuminous Marketing, Inc. answers basic SEO questions about Keywords in SEO such as, What are keywords? Can keywords be phrases? Are SEO Keywords case sensitive? Where do you put keywords?
Video Transcription
Speaker – Gwen Beren:
One question that I get asked about SEO frequently is…
What Are Keywords?
Keywords are essentially the words or phrases that people type into search engines or speak into their voice-enabled device to find the information that they want. So if you want your website or your web property to come up for those keywords or key phrases that people are using, there are a few key areas that you need to get your keywords inserted into for your web properties.
Can Keywords Be Phrases?
So another question that I get is are keywords also phrases, or can they be multiple words? And the answer is absolutely. A lot of times, keywords are actually phrases, things like what is content marketing? What are keywords? Or things that have more of local intent, like an SEO expert near me, or a restaurant near me, things along those lines. So those are all phrases.
And the best way to get started with planning out your keyword strategy for your web property is to start off by making a list. I prefer a spreadsheet myself. But it should probably be digitized. So make a list of all the keywords that you think you’d like to come up, with for your website. And then just take a little bit of time to go through and Google each of those keywords. They might give you some ideas about keywords that you really don’t want to come up for once you see what comes up, or they might give you some ideas of how to add to your list. So you keep this big list handy so that you can use it and refer back to it whenever you’re creating content.
Are SEO Keywords Case Sensitive?
Another question that we get frequently is are keywords case-sensitive. And the short answer to that is no, keywords are not case-sensitive. Search engines are not paying attention to a capitalized letter or a lowercase letter when someone is doing a search. For instance, just think about a voice search. If you’re talking into your Siri or your Google phone, and you’re asking them a question, that doesn’t necessarily always detect whether or not you have a capital letter or a lowercase letter.
There are a few best practices regarding capitalization that you should follow. One of them that I generally follow is using lower case letters in your URLs. So if you are using keywords in your URLs, do be sure to just use them all lowercase, even if it is a proper noun that would normally be capitalized. Another rule of thumb to follow is that if the area that you’re optimizing is going to be visible to users to make sure that you’re using proper capitalization there. Those areas are your page titles, your meta descriptions, and your page headings. And also, of course, your website content. Because you do want to seem as professional as you possibly can.
Where Do You Put Keywords?
So that kind of leads us to where do we put these keywords? And we put the keywords, we use this list of keywords for everything from your webpage copy to your blog posts, to guest blog posts, your bio on LinkedIn, some of the hashtags that you might use on LinkedIn or Instagram or any other social media channel, your images, your alt tags. There is all manner of different ways to use keywords. And so along those lines, we’ve put together a keyword content planner for you that you can download at the link below, and that will help you take those keywords from that big list and put them into places that will really make the biggest impact for you with search engines. So this is Gwen Beren, CEO of Illuminous Marketing and partner in Click Collective. If you have any questions, do feel free to reach out on Twitter, @IlluminousGwen, or any of the other social media channels linked below. Thank you.
