Keywords: Why and Where You Should Be Using Them

Keywords, the greatest tool you can ever have and understand how to use.  Search engines are based on keywords.  When you type into a search engine that you want to look up famous quotes about life by Albert Einstein, the search engine is trying to return results that best match your request.  It will find anything that is about Albert Einstein and mentions quotes and life.  It is quite simple, except when your search results return hundreds of results.  So where can you use keywords?

Finding Things Online

As mentioned, you can use them in a search engine to find things online.  If you are at your favorite blog or online store, you can usually enter keywords to find what you are looking for.  If you want a book by a particular author on Amazon.com, you can enter the authors name and a drop down appears that says the authors name and topics they are available in.  You would select books.  On Google, searching for Albert Einstein quotes returns several sites with quotes from the famous physicist.

Job Hunting

When you post your resume online at Monster or CareerBuilder you are making that resume available to their search engines.  Employers access these search engines and input keywords related to the position they are trying to fill.  The good news is you can access their search engines as well to search for those open positions. Using the right keywords helps you to be found, and for you to search for the right positions.

The best advice to offer when writing your resume is to avoid writing what you think should be said and what you think the keywords are.  You should search for jobs you might like and to incorporate into your resume the keywords you find in their search results.  Let’s say you find a technical writer position listed and it states that the company wants someone familiar with the APA style, has good proofreading skills, understands medical and technical terminology, are organized, and a self-starter.  You will want to make sure, as long as you have that set of skills and experience, that you use those same keywords common in the search results in your resume.  I also recommend you search for a few similar positions and see which words pop up the most.

Web Publishing and Building an Online Presence

If you are posting a blog and want to be found in the search results under certain topics, you tag your blog with relevant keywords.  An easy example is posting to Twitter.  They show their latest trending topics.  To show up at the top of search results on those topics you will find users posting a link to their material loaded with those trending keywords.

While that is annoying, it does get you to show up in results.  Results are where you want to be.  Proper tagging in your blogs (WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger), pins (Pinterest), tweats (Twitter), and on a main business site gets you to show up in relevant search engines.  Do the research to find out what the relevant and most popular keywords are and you will get more noticed.