Resources Keyword Research

Keyword Research

What is a Keyword?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An index term, subject term, subject heading, or descriptor, in information retrieval, is a term that captures the essence of the topic of a document. Index terms make up a controlled vocabulary for use in bibliographic records. They are an integral part of bibliographic control, which is the function by which libraries collect, organize and disseminate documents. They are used as keywords to retrieve documents in an information system, for instance, a catalog or a search engine. A popular form of keywords on the web are tags which are directly visible and can be assigned by non-experts also. Index terms can consist of a word, phrase, or alphanumerical term. They are created by analyzing the document either manually with subject indexing or automatically with automatic indexing or more sophisticated methods of keyword extraction. Index terms can either come from a controlled vocabulary or be freely assigned.

Keywords are stored in a search index. Common words such as articles (a, an, the) and conjunctions (and, or, but) are not treated as keywords because it is inefficient to do so. Almost every English-language site on the Internet has the article “the“, and so it makes no sense to search for it. The most popular search engine, Google removed stop words such as “the” and “a” from its indexes for several years, but then re-introduced them, making certain types of precise search possible again.

So what does this mean for you?

 

The Importance of Keyword Research

Whenever you do a search in any of  the  search engines such as  Google, Bing, or  Yahoo, you type in your search phrase. The search engine return the sites that

Keyword research is a practice used by search engine optimization professionals to find and research actual search terms people enter into the search engines when conducting a search. Search engine optimization professionals research keywords in order to achieve better rankings in their desired keywords.