Keywords are the words and phrases that define a piece of content posted online.  They’re used frequently within the content, and are often the words and phrases for which the writer wants the content to rank highly on in search engines.

Several years ago, having the right keywords in the meta description (meta tags) of a website would alert the search engines of the importance of those keywords in your content.  Later, simply repeating those keywords within the content of the site would show their importance.  These days, after the Google Penguin updates, it’s harder to control which specific keywords a page ranks for, though keywords are still relevant.

Finding the right set of keywords to try to rank for will make the best use of the time and energy put into designing a site.  If a keyword has a high search volume on the search engines, but there aren’t many sites writing about it, then there are a lot of potential visitors available if you create the right piece of content to fill that niche.

Keywords also come into play in hashtags on supported platforms.