A lot of people are confused about the difference between Websites and Webpages when it comes to search engines.
Your website is your overall theme and encompasses all of your webpages. It is your webpages that show up in the search engines not just your website.
For example, if you have a website about Ice Cream and you have 40 or so pages on your website each named “vanilla”, “chocolate”, “mint”, “chocolate chip cookie dough”, “peppermint”, and so on, each of these individual pages will be visited by the search engines and indexed or put into their database.
People have a misconception that it is their website and their website only that gets found in the search engines. What you need to understand is that since each individual page on your site is indexed, each of these pages needs to be keyword optimized.
It is these individual pages that your site visitors will find and thus your website.
I hope this has helped to clear up some confusion as to the difference – albeit slight – between the two.
All the best,
Kristine
So my website is like the “house” and my webpages are like all the things in my house? Am I reading this right?
Comment by MichaelsMom — September 8, 2006 @ 8:07 pm
you are 100% correct!
I should use your explanation instead of mine
Comment by Kristine - A WAHM — September 17, 2006 @ 9:37 pm
So how are keywords related to this?
Comment by MSBLUE — September 23, 2006 @ 11:06 am
I’m a little confused about that too.
Comment by biscuit88 — September 26, 2006 @ 2:11 am
Each webPAGE focuses on a keyword. So in our example, we might have a page labeled “chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream”. This term is then our keyword for our page.
The same goes for “vanilla ice cream” and “peppermint ice cream”.
Whatever the subtopics are for your website is the keyword that you should focus on for your pages. Just remember first to do keyword research to find out if the term you want to use is something that is popular.
A quick example:
If I head over to Wordtracker and enter in the term “chocolate chip cookie dough” I see that only 14 people searched on that term in the last 90 days. So I may want to broaden my keyword search a bit to simply “ice cream”.
If I do that, I see that almost 3,000 people searched on that term in the last 90 days but that they aren’t looking for flavors of ice cream but rather “recipes”, “ice cream makers” and even “ice cream and cake”. So my website would then need to change to reflect what people are searching for.
Hope that helps!
Kristine
Comment by Kristine - A WAHM — September 26, 2006 @ 2:21 am