Overview
When an internet surfer uses a search engine to seek information, the words entered into the search field are known as the "keyphrase." For instance, if a student researching civil rights for an American History class types "rosa parks" into the search field, then the keyphrase is "rosa parks," not "civil rights" or "american history."
For all of the keyphrases that are relevant to your mission, your goal should be to position your advocacy content at the top of search engine results.
Keyphrases are the foundation of all internet advocacy techniques. You can use keyphrases on your webpages, in press releases, in contextual advertising campaigns, in pay-per-click advertising campaigns, on social networking sites, and in your syndicated content.
Ineffective use of keyphrases can make your organization's website virtually invisible to the online world. On the other hand, effective use of keyphrases can position your advocacy content as the most authoritative and influential on the internet. Top ranking on Google, Yahoo, and MSN for your keyphrases will draw internet users, journalists, and bloggers to your point of view.
Search Engines Reward Patterns not Meanings
Always remember: Computers recognize alphabetical letters, but they don't speak English and they don't understand meanings. Instead, when considering the relevance of millions of competing webpages for a particular search query, search engines analyze character patterns. For instance, if a 500 word webpage includes the character pattern "r-o-s-a p-a-r-k-s" 35 times but "m-o-n-t-g-o-m-e-r-y c-i-t-y" only once, then Google assumes that that particular webpage is highly relevant to a person searching for information on "rosa parks" but not "montgomery city," even though Google has no idea what "rosa parks" and "montgomery city" actually mean.
Consequently, don't expect to be ranked highly on Google for a particular keyphrase unless you intentionally create a webpage where that keyphrase has a "density" of at least 3% — in other words, at least 3% of the words on that page are the keyphrase or a closely related variant.
Prioritizing Keyphrases
Simple research will tell you which keyphrases can have the greatest advocacy impact for your cause. This chapter will show you how.
As you do that research, you'll need to discover which search terms your target audience uses when researching issues related to your mission, review your website's log files, and discover which keyphrases are targeted by your "competition."
At the end of the research process, you'll need to make decisions about which critical keyphrases could potentially win you the share-of-influence battle on the internet, and which keyphrases are relevant but have too much competition for your time or budget to overcome. Successful keyphrase optimization will be rewarded with substantially increased website traffic and influence.
Friendly Advice from the Author
Although it's tempting to skip ahead to the "good stuff" (the internet advocacy tactics), I strongly recommend that you read this chapter first. Then, re-read it. Then, experiment with each of the keyphrase research techniques it presents.
Here's why: Unless you conduct and leverage keyphrase research, your internet advocacy impact will be no better than mediocre. In other words, if you don't do your keyphrase homework, you will either miss your advocacy objective, or you will spend far too much time and money to achieve it. Enough said.
