If you have a website and want to make sure that it gets seen by people looking for your product or service, you will need to know about keywords. You are probably using them almost every day, although you may not be calling them "keywords." These are the words or phrases that you enter into a search engine when you are looking for something specific.

The websites that pop up are ones that contain the keywords you entered. When you want traffic to your site, you want yours to be one of the ones that pops up when people enter words relating to your product. However, it isn't as simple as just having a site. You have to be submitted to each engine with your specific keywords linked to your site. Internet marketing firms can help with this; they often have specially developed software to assist in analysis.

The Rules of the Game

Now, each search engine, such as Google, Yahoo and Excite, all have different rules as to how they rank sites. After each engine has compiled a list of sites and keywords from each site, they have to index the sites. The search engines want to make it so that a search is done as fast as possible. To do this, they will conduct a process called "weighting."

Weighting is when a numeric value is given to each word. The values spread out evenly so that the more popular keywords match up with the less popular ones. For instance, you are bound to find plenty more words beginning with "s" than you are with "x." The weight can also consist of things like where in the document the word shows up and if it's in all capitals or bold lettering.