When you go to a search engine and try to find something, you type in a word, or several words, and click the search button. The search engine then looks in its index for those words.

Suppose that you used the words “car racing”. Generally speaking, the search engine will look for various things:

• Pages that contain the exact phrase “car racing”
• Pages that don’t have the phrase “car racing”, but do have the words “car” and “racing” in close proximity
• Pages that have the word “car” and “racing” somewhere, though not necessarily close together
• Pages with word stems; for instance, pages with the word “car” and the word “race” somewhere in the page
• Pages that have links pointing to them, in which the link text contains the phrase “car racing”
• Pages with links pointing to them with the link text containing the words “car” and “racing”, although not together.

The process is actually a lot more complicated than this. The search engine doesn’t necessarily show pages in order listed above.  Learn more about the imporatance of keywords, in our part 2 of understanding the importance of keywords.