Keywords
If you are like most website owners you want people to visit your website. There is not much point in having a site if no-one comes to visit and read what you have to say or buy your products or services.
Search Engine Traffic
The vast majority of website owners rely heavily on the search engines to deliver targeted visitor traffic to their site, but few are aware of what they need to do to make it happen. You see, it all comes down to keywords.
What Are Keywords?
Put simply, keywords are the words and phrases that people type into their search requests when they do a search on Google for example. Now Google and all the other seach engines index the pages on your website and take note of the words you have on your pages. From those words, it determines what your page is all about and keeps that information in its database.
For example, if you have a webpage about 'dog training' and your page is 'well optimised' for the term dog training, then there is a reasonable chance that the search engine will serve up your webpage as one of the many it lists as search results when someone goes looking for 'dog training'.
Just where your webpage appears on the search results list is affected by many other factors, but if you don't have the right keywords to start with, there's very little chance it's going to make it at all. Ideally you want your site to appear on the first page of results because that's what people see first when they do a search.
Keywords and Domain Names
The best place to start in making your site attractive to the search engines is to have a domain name that includes the keywords you are trying to become well known for.
In the example above, if you are trying to get ranked for the term 'dog training' then it would be very valuable if your site's domain was say AcmeDogTraining.com rather than just Acme.com
The domain name is the very first thing the search engines look at when they are ranking your sites importance for the keywords you are using. So you may as well give them what they want and assist yourself in the process by choosing a domain name with your keyword in it.
