What is the very first and absolutely fundamental thing that anyone should acquire before moving into the deeper stages of SEO? In fact, SEO would simply be impossible to perform without this.
Ask any true SEO practitioner and they will tell you the same thing.
Keywords
Think about it, without the right keywords, there will be nothing to optimize FOR and there will be nothing to optimize WITH. With the right keywords, you can target the right audience and thus allowing your business to be found and connect with the right people.
The entire concept of SEO REVOLVES around keywords, and that is why keyword research is such large and important aspect. But it’s not as simple as acquiring any or as much keywords as you can.
That won’t mean your SEO campaign is a guaranteed success because choosing the wrong ones is just as equally ineffective. You also have to be smart in which keywords you choose and how you choose to use it.
Primary Keywords
We are more than familiar with these all-important keywords. These keywords are the keywords that you would like to rank for. It’s these keywords that you want your target audience (and potential prospects) to find your site with.
For the sake of simplicity we shall refer to them as PRIMARY keywords. Primary keywords should always be in your site’s title tags, Meta tags, internal links, and of course, the body of your page contents.
Primary keywords are also an integral part of your backlink building strategy. Because your primary keywords will be used a lot in the anchor texts of your backlinks. And that is one of the best ways of utilizing your primary keywords.
Alas, as powerful as they primary keywords are, they can suffer from “overuse”. When it comes to this point, it starts to lose its effectiveness and in some cases, it can be damaging enough to jeopardize your entire SEO efforts.
This is because when you keep using the same one, especially for backlinks, things will not appear so natural anymore. But overusing the same keyword for building backlinks might not be so damaging as actually using the same keyword over and over again for your website page.
Secondary Keywords
Therefore a healthy dose of anchor links should include your main (primary) keywords as well a sprinkle of other set of keywords. This should be your SECONDARY keywords. These keywords may be comprised be derived from your main keywords. This applies to synonyms, different sequence, and arrangement, adding it with nouns, adjectives, or even verbs where appropriate.
Doing this will make your overall links sound more natural which can also cover what other people are using to search your contents. Everyone searches using different terms and phrases, so by diversifying your keywords as well (it IS your primary keywords but merely in a different form, but still retains the same context).
Secondary keywords are not only used for anchor texts for backlinks, but also for the internal links on your site. Because using the same primary keywords on your website without changing it’s form or sequence will easily shoot up your keyword density to the level of keyword-stuffing.
Therefore by employing secondary keywords on your site, you will not be penalized for keyword stuffing but at the same time you will still be able to retain the context of the primary keywords.
Therefore secondary keywords are just as important as primary keywords themselves. You can’t purely rely only your primary keywords. Secondary keywords are not meant to achieve a higher rank in the search engine results for your web page. Think of your secondary keywords as “reinforcing” or “supplementing” your primary keywords.
By having a wide array of keyword variants which is derived from your main keywords, can make your SEO efforts sound more natural to both your web visitors and also the search engines. Imagine if you have only used the same keywords over and over again on the contents of your website. It will look spammy, and will eventually become annoying for the visitors for those who do stay long enough.