Keywords in SEO: What They Actually Do

Keywords are among the most misunderstood parts of SEO, largely because the popular advice about them stopped being true over a decade ago and kept circulating anyway. This is what they are, what they're for, and which two widely-repeated techniques to actively discard.

What a keyword actually is

A keyword is simply the word or phrase someone types into a search box. That's the whole definition. It isn't a special tag you put in your HTML, and it isn't something you own.

The word is misleading in two ways. It's rarely a single word — most searches are several words. And "key" implies a mechanism, as if the right term unlocks a ranking. It doesn't. A keyword is a description of what someone wanted, and your page either addresses that or doesn't.

The useful reframe: instead of "what keyword should I target?", ask "what question is this page the best answer to?" Same work, and it points somewhere more productive.

Intent is the part that matters

The same words can mean completely different things, and search engines have spent years getting better at telling them apart. Broadly:

• Informational — "what is a canonical tag". They want an explanation.
• Navigational — "github login". They want a specific place.
• Commercial — "best static site host". They're comparing before deciding.
• Transactional — "buy standing desk". They're ready to act.

Matching intent matters more than matching wording. A page selling something will not rank for an informational query no matter how often the phrase appears, because it doesn't do what the searcher wanted.

Short, mid and long-tail

A distinction from the old version of this article that's still genuinely useful:

• Short-tail (1–2 words) — "hosting". Enormous volume, brutal competition, ambiguous intent. A new site has no realistic chance, and wouldn't benefit much if it did.
• Mid-tail (2–3 words) — "php hosting". Narrower, still competitive, intent clearer.
• Long-tail (4+ words) — "cheap php hosting with ssh access". Low volume, low competition, and unambiguous — you know exactly what they want.

Long-tail phrases are where a small site can realistically compete, and the traffic is better than the volume suggests: someone searching a precise question and finding a precise answer is far more likely to stay, and to return.

Two pieces of advice to unlearn

Both appear in enormous amounts of still-published SEO writing, including the 2020 version of this page.

Keyword density targets. The idea that you should calculate what percentage of your words are the keyword — commonly "aim for 1–2%" — and adjust to hit it. There is no such threshold. It's a rule invented to approximate search engines from the early 2000s, and following it produces text that repeats a phrase unnaturally. Modern systems understand synonyms and paraphrase; repetition beyond natural use is at best neutral and at worst reads as spam.

The meta keywords tag. <meta name="keywords"> is ignored by Google, and has been since 2009 — it was abandoned precisely because it was trivially abused. Filling it in is harmless but pointless. The meta tag that does matter is the description, which doesn't affect ranking directly but heavily affects whether anyone clicks.

Using keywords without writing for a robot

What's left once density targets are gone is unglamorous and effective:

• Put the phrase where it's genuinely descriptive — the title, the H1, the opening paragraph, and any heading where it belongs. Not because a checklist says so, but because a page whose title matches the question is easier to recognise as the answer.
• Use the words the reader would use. If people say "cheap hosting" and you've written "cost-effective hosting solutions", you've optimised for nobody.
• Write related vocabulary naturally. Anything genuinely about hosting will mention uptime, bandwidth, SSH, backups — not because they're "LSI keywords" but because you can't cover the subject without them. That's the actual signal.
• One primary question per page. Two pages targeting the same query compete with each other; neither wins cleanly.

Where keywords sit among the other technical basics is covered in Where to Actually Start With SEO on a New Site.

Finding them

You don't need paid tooling to start:

• Search Console — the only source showing what people actually searched before landing on your pages. Often reveals queries you never considered writing for.
• Autocomplete and "People also ask" — real queries, phrased the way people phrase them.
• Your own inbox and support questions — if someone asked you, others are searching it.

Paid tools add volume estimates and competition scores, useful once you're choosing between candidates at scale. For a site with a few dozen pages, the free sources will keep you supplied longer than you expect.