Definition: a word used in performing a search.
Keywords are used by Web surfers to describe what they hope to find when performing a Web search. This statement of a real-time want/need has not gone unnoticed by Web marketers, many of whom have tried to benefit from keyword advertising buys and or search engine optimization.
In computer programming, a keyword is a word or identifier that has a particular meaning to the programming language. The meaning of keywords -- and, indeed, the meaning of the notion of keyword -- differs widely from language to language.
Languages vary as to what is provided as a keyword and what is a library routine. Some languages, for instance, provide keywords for input/output operations whereas in others these are library routines. In languages with macros or lazy evaluation, control flow constructs such as if can be implemented as macros or functions. In languages without these expressive features, they are generally keywords.
In the linguitic word a keyword is a word which occurs in a text more often than we would expect to occur by chance alone. Keywords are calculated by carrying out a statistical test (e.g. loglinear) which compares the word frequencies in a text against their expected frequencies derived in a much larger corpus, which acts as a reference for general language use. AntConc is a freely available text analysis tool capable of calculating keywords.
A keyword in an Internet search is one of the words used to find matching web pages.
It was popularized during the early days of search engine development, as it was not possible to ask natural language questions and find the desired sites. Searches gave the best results if only a few keywords were chosen and searched for. These "keywords" captured the essence of the topic in question and were likely to be present on all sites listed by the search engine. Keywords are still used today. Many modern search engines have methods for determining which words in a search string are important and are ought to be treated as keywords. 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.
how often a keyword was searched by users in an given period of time.
how difficult it is to position a keyword in the search engine results.
There are a lot of tools available in the web that would help you in your good keywords search.
Please use our free tool that we have developed that measure the real difficulty for a keyword to perform on search engines.