Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts at 101 Management, Inc., often talk about “keywords” when we’re helping you optimize your search engine visibility. Here’s what they are and why they matter.

Keywords are the phrases (always more than a single word) that the average person might use to find your product or service online. For example, if you’re selling your book on how to interview for a job, the keywords someone might use when looking for that book could be: “job interviews,” “job hunting,” “interviewing for a job,” “acing a job interview,” “how to do job interviews,” “tips for job interviews,” and on and on.

The various search engines employ sophisticated algorithms to decide how to respond to searchers’ requests. They weigh over 200 factors in an instant to produce the often millions of results that pop up on their screens.

One of the things they do is to automatically “crawl” or “spider” through your website to view and analyze your content and judge how closely the keywords you have on it match the requested search phrase, or keywords. If these automated programs decide your site is a good fit, it includes your site in the results page. The better the fit, the higher up it will place you in the results.

When people look up a topic on one of the search engines (usually Google), the results pop up in a series of pages. Studies have shown that 91% of those people don’t go beyond the first page of results, and more than 50% don’t go beyond the second page to find what they’re looking for.

That’s why it’s vital that your business be among those who show up in the first or second page of search results and that’s what we at 101 Management help you accomplish. If people can’t find you, they can’t buy what you’re offering. Because we understand the analytics used by the various search engines, we help you place your business among those lucky few who literally rise to the top in searches. We also know how to avoid the most common errors in keyword utilization, how to update and expand your SEO keyword list, and how to make it easy for people to find what you are offering.

Of course, there is so much more to SEO than just using the correct keywords, but finding and effectively utilizing keywords is the first step in successful SEO. Let our specialists guide you in this critical marketing tool.