Found in Translation

If the proper subject of my page is "identifying the subject of a web page for search engine optimization" I still have one more step before implementation. I call this step "subject translation." It's really pretty simple. All you have to do is ask yourself the question, what might I type in to Google if I were interested in learning about how to identify the subject of a web page?

And in asking this question I've come close to answering it. I'd probably type in something like "how to identify the subject of a web page." This translation step is important because people don't usually use the best possible words and phrases in their search requests. They play around with different ways of wording their queries until they get what they want. As the translator, you simply want to take the subject and translate it slightly, to match the words and phrases people might actually use to find it.

So in this case I'll translate my subject from "identifying the subject of a web page for search engine optimization" to "how to determine the best keywords for a web page." I've added the phrase "how to" because people sometimes form their search phrases with questions. I've changed the word "subject" to "best keywords" because while determining the subject is what really is at issue, people don't think of it that way. They think about "keywords"--so they'd likely use that word in their search.

Finally, I'm going to check a couple things out before I nail down my phrase. I need to know if people usually spell "keywords" as one word or two, and the same question for web page. For this I'll use Google Trends.


Google Trends (trends.google.com) is a great tool for determining which words or topics people are typing into search Google most frequently. In this case I just enter the two options separated by a comma. Keywords, and Key Words. Clearly Keywords as one word is more popular so I'll use that, and web page is usually entered as two words so I'll stick with that.   next >