The following is the definition of a keyword as found on Wikipedia:
A keyword (also index term or descriptor) in Information Retrieval is a term that captures the essence of the topic of a document or a search query. When a descriptor is descriptive, it can be an effective search parameter. It is used to retrieve documents in an information system, for instance a catalouge or a search engine. It can consist of a word, phrase, or alphanumerical term. Keywords are created by analyzing the document either manually with subject indexing or automatically with fulltext indexing or more sophisticated methods of keyword extraction. Keywords are stored in an Index.
Common words like articles (a, an, the) and conjunctions (and, or, but) are not treated as keywords because it is inefficient to do so. Almost every English-language site on the Internet has the article “the”, and so it makes no sense to search for it. The most popular search engine, Google removed Stop words such as “the” and “a” from its indexes for several years, but then re-introduced them, making certain types of precise search possible again.
Kind of interesting and windy but it still leaves a little room for improvement in describing just what a keyword or key phrase is.
What is a noun? Again, we use Wikipedia for that description or definition as well:
A noun is a word used to name a person, animal, place, thing, and abstract idea.
Hmmm. The description of a noun fits nearly identically with the true description of what a keyword is in relation to those word attributes searched for on the world-wide web.
Well, now, what is a key phrase or keyword phrase?
As the correlation between the definition of a noun and a keyword are nearly identical, similarly, the correlation between the definition of a key phrase and an adjective preceding a noun would be a nearly identical fit as well.
Some examples:
Criminal Defense Attorney = where Criminal Defense is the adjective and Attorney being the noun.
Worker Compensation Law Firm = where Worker Compensation is the adjective and Law Firm being the noun.
New Providence New Jersey (Geographical Nouns) Personal Injury (Adjective) Attorney (Noun)
Some examples of nouns:
Criminal Defense, Law Firm, Attorney, Attorneys, Lawyers, Lawyer, Worker Compensation, Law, Laws, drugs, New York, Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia
Now, what does this mean to optimization? Using the aforementioned definitions, I use a speed reading, speed writing and/or stenographers’ template. That is, by looking at a website, verbs, adverbs and stop words, such as, the, them, with, a, and, by, for, with, then, so are all discarded leaving the “meat” of the text, which when positioned correctly and non-repetitively, makes for non-pattern forming keywords and key phrases. Since these keywords and key phrases are culled directly from the web pages’ text and overall “look and feel”, the relevancy of all words and phrases are ensured and should match up with existing keyword and key phrase categories as found in search engine data streams and data bases.
