While several factors contribute to how a website ranks for a given search term, keywords are the basis on which websites are categorized and indexed.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN use web crawlers to scour the internet for information. The information the web crawlers collect comes from websites, and that information is broken down and stored with a reference to the website it came from.

This is a sample of the text a webcrawler would collect from the Search Marketing Corporation homepage, and how it would be broken down:

In actuallity, a webcrawler would capture hundreds of keyword combinations from the Search Marketing Corporation home page. So with all of these keyword combinations associated with the home page, how does a search engine know what the topic of the webpage is?

One of the ways search engines determine the topic of the webpage is by crawling the title, description, and keyword tags.

These tags are found in the header or top section of a website. The information in these tags is created by the web author. In the case of Search Marketing Corporations home page, the tags read like this:

Title: Search Marketing Corporation - search engine optimization, search engine marketing, social media marketing

Keywords: search marketing corporation,search engine optimization,search engine marketing,social media marketing

Description: Search Marketing Corporation, digital marketing solutions for an ever changing search landscape

Notice how the word "Search Marketing" appears in the title, description and keyword tags, and is also the dominant keyword found in the text on the home page. Since it was our intention to allow people who are interested in search marketing to find this website, we used the main keyword set across these tags, creating a 'harmony' that helps the search engines validate the purpose of the website.