When it comes to keywords, it’s just semantics…or is it?
September 18th, 2007
se·man·tics The meaning or the interpretation of a word, sentence, or other language form: We’re basically agreed; let’s not quibble over semantics.
I’m always quick to pull out the old “semantics” argument with friends and family. But when it comes to website design and online marketing semantics are huge! You know what your business is and the words you use to describe it. But you’re already visiting your site, you need to find out the words that people searching the internet use to find businesses in your industry.
This issue came to the forefront of my mind this afternoon when I stumbled upon a site called Geoff’s Google Duel. This site is basically just an application that allows you to compare the number of results for two different keywords or keyword phrases. Just out of curiosity I entered “web design” vs. “website design.” Here are the results:
Now what stands out to me immediately looking at those numbers is that I should definitely be actively targeting “website design” as the competition is far less than “web design.” And it might be a more realistic shorter term search engine goal. If you have a young or newly redesigned site, reaching the top 100 for “web design” could really be an impossible dream, but with a lot of hard work and active marketing, it could be a possibility for “website design” or at least not bring quite as loud of snorts and smirks from the pros as reaching the top of “web design!”
Keep in mind though…that there are other things to take into account. There is probably a reason those numbers are so lopsided. The number of searches for “web design” is probably higher, right?
A quick search on Wordtracker shows that the daily prediction for number of searches is as follows:
- “website design” - 2,030 searches per day
- “web design” - 6,291 searches per day
From a purely free, organic search engine optimization point of view, I for one, would not snub my nose at over 2,000 searches a day. So you might notice me substituting “website design” for “web design” here and there.
After all, it’s just semantics!
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Unfortunately this is something I don’t do well enough and should really pay some attention to. Thanks for a timely reminder, Dana!
Excellent post, and I would also add that in terms of “moving up the ladder” as far as ranking, I would much prefer website design since you’re contending with less competition in terms of a ratio as well. In other words, there are 10x as many pages dedicated [or containing] web design, but 1/10 the amount dedicated to website design, yet only 1/3 the searches! That’s pretty significant, and yields more searches per site.
Thanks for your comment Danny. I completely agree with you. I’d rather focus on what’s reachable and let the other come around in 4 or 5 years from just being
I m agree with you
it seems the profession says should to search website design and people more curious to search web design.
yea, i need to work on the keyword
but keyword is very important,
Always nice to get a little reminder about the importance of keywords
keywords is very important and i think i haven’t been doing quite well in that area. think i will improve
well, therefore, if the number of seraches for website design is so small, why should I use this keyword?