Keyword Competition
What is keyword competition?
In the world of the World Wide Web everyone is trying to make a buck on the "Net". Recently one of the most popular and profitable ways to make money on the Internet is using keywords to get people to look at your pages. If you can get people to look at your pages, you can sell ad space on your pages. If you sell ad space, you make money; that all sounds simple, but I still haven't explained keywords.
Another part of the World Wide Web, or Web, or WWW is the search engine world. As soon as the Web got off to a flying start people realized that finding what you were looking for was getting more difficult every day. Luckily for us, the language which is the backbone of the Web is designed to make searching easy. Hyper Text Markup Language, HTML uses keywords as ways to mark documents for searching. HTML had no internal search engine capable of searching the huge numbers of documents coming onto the Web each day.
The Web being what it is, people began to design search engines and programs called bots, which is short for robots, to search the Web and collect the keywords from the pages. This is not that difficult, since the keywords are in a part of the document called the header.
A big part of the problem is to serve-up the proper site, for the proper keyword. What evolved is a system of rating specific sites with matching keywords by determining how often they were picked by users. This keyword popularity contest was carried out by the search engine programs. Yahoo and Google, and other search engines soon realized that some keywords were searched more than others and started selling advertising on the side of the search results pages. This advertising space is sold on a "pay by click" basis, which means that you agree to pay a specified amount each time someone clicks on your ad. Pay-per-click works alongside the other two methods of putting your page first when someone is looking for what you are selling. Originally, the only way to get listed first was to win the popularity contest, and have your page selected more often than other, similar pages. The search engines soon started selling a few paid advertisements above the results of the search. If you bought one of those advertisements, your page was listed before the most popular page no matter how popular your page is or isn't.
All of this is linked to keywords and keyword searching. Like most other things in life, people found ways to rig the system and make their pages come out on top, even when other pages might actually be more popular. Considering this unfair, the search engine developers began ranking pages differently. One of the changes they made was to make change a constant in the search engine to that they could keep ahead of the people trying to get ahead of the engines.
Over the years, a few words have stood out as hotter keywords than most. There evolved a competition among the Web developers to find the best keywords to get high position on the search engines. Sometimes you will find pages that don't have any connection to the content of a page in the header of a page. These developers are working the system to get you to read their pages and maybe buy their product. Sometimes the real product is not the product in the body of the page, but rather the product(s) being offered in the ads on the destination page.
The Internet is a big collection of billboards on a highway that spans the world and allows you to buy from a store half way across the world as easily as buying from your local grocery. To open the door to the store across the world, all you need is the proper keyword. To position that store where you will find it, the developer needs to use the keywords that will allow that page to win the keyword competition, or you may never find the store that she/he is trying to get you to. It is a totally different question if you will find the store that you want.