Do You Know Where Is The Best Pizza In Chicago IL?

Keywords for your small business website.

Part Three of creating an effective small business website.

Not the best pizza in Chicago because it's in Lake Geneva, WI

I did not ask the question in the post title because I am looking for pizza in Chicago. Although, I have had some very good pizza in Chicago. I also know a great place to get Chicago Style Pizza in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. This is about keywords for your small business website. We are going to start working on the content for your website.

What are keywords and why are they important?

Basically, keywords are the words people might use to find your type of business in a search engine like Google. The words they type in the box. What they want to know. Keyword study can even be nearly a full time occupation for some internet marketers as they try to rank for different keywords to get traffic.

Most small business websites don't rank for any related keywords.

Typing in "Where is the best pizza in Chicago, Illinois gets some pizza restaurants in Chicago.

Is this the best pizza in Chicago?

It also gets a bunch of sites that are not even from Chicago. List type sites that rank better than most pizza restaurants. Many are not much better than spam sites. Yet, they know more about keywords and search engine optimization than a local restaurant owner does. In fact, I am guessing that not long after this post, this site might rank better than some pizza places for where is the best pizza in Chicago. "Best Pizza" is a different beast altogether in my guess though.

Keywords are the words  used most often in searches.

There are short tail keywords and long tail keywords. A short tail keyword might be "business website". The short phrase is searched for more often then a longer one. Long tail keywords might be more like "effective small business website". Both of these are probably very difficult phrases to rank for though. There is a lot of competition for small business websites by those who have a lot more time to spend on SEO than I do.

You as a small business owner have an advantage in keywords though.

You can work the long tail a lot longer than most search engine optimized list type sites. You can also work it better. Keep reading this series and I'll cover how to use them.

Once you have a list of keywords you can start to use the keywords as your write the content for your site.

You will need to make sure you use them. It is best, however; to use them just slightly more than often than you would in normal writing or communication. You don't want it to sound strange when someone reads it. You do want to make sure the search engines know what your talking about on the page. Some people go so far as to worry about the exact percentage a keyword shows on a page. I just type the whole keyword or keyword phrase a bit more often where I might use a pronoun. Two to four times a will be good.

My next post in this series will cover some of the ways to figure out the keywords you need in your small business website content.