OntoSearch

Search engines take quite a few things into account when deciding where to position your website in the search results. And many men and women still feel that keyword density, which is the number of times a word or number of words appears on a web page, is still an extremely critical consideration.

Why is keyword density so important?

When Google was perhaps not really as clever as it is today, keyword density affected search engine rankings fairly markedly. And because of this many folks still like to focus on the concept of keyword density being high on Google’s list of important algorithms. It’s also an straightforward concept to understand so is usually highlighted with significantly much more importance than it deserves.

So is keyword density not that critical?

Because Keyword density was easy to optimise it soon became devalued by Google.  It was effortless for webmasters to create a webpage with the relevant keyword ‘stuffed’ onto the page hundreds of times in order to profit from highly searched for terms. Keyword stuffing, as this practice became recognized has since been classified as spam by Google and those who try it will only see there website devalued.

When folks began to ‘optimise’ their web pages to take benefit of the way that Google’s algorithm worked, it required to find a better way to rank pages. To do this the developers at Google developed an improved algorithm that paid more attention to the content that was on the page. The algorithm now works by looking at relevant phrases and synonyms on the page, which is otherwise recognized as latent semantic indexing.

Does Google use latent semantic indexing?

Google uses latent semantic indexing as a way to locate out what a web page is about. It works like this – a document featuring the words ‘Ipod’, ‘Itunes’, ‘Mac’ and ‘Ipad’ would be about Apple. You do not need the word ‘Apple’ to appear on the page twenty times to know this.

It is also crucial to take into consideration related words simply because if ‘Apple’ appeared on a webpage as well as the word ‘fruit’, it takes the connection away from IT to an altogether diverse meaning.

How can the algorithm realize the differences in language?

We are all aware that pc systems discover it really challenging to tell the difference and the similarity between certain phrases and terms.  We recognize the complexities of language from an early age and as such we can sometimes tell you in which way a word can be employed without knowing why it should be utilized in this way. Our understanding of the written word and the spoken word is much much more complex than we would ever believe.

How can this affect the content on your web site?

All this makes writing for the web a lot simpler. In the past you had to write for the human readers and also for search engines such as Google. Due to the fact Google uses latent semantic indexing as long as you write on the topic of your page or internet site, Google can determine the meaning from your content and hence rank it appropriately.

You need to not however ignore the search engines when you are writing your content, it just lets you use the way they work to your benefit.

Keep your content relevant

If you make every single page on your website have a predetermined focus the wording, terms and phrases that you use will appear naturally. And if you write for folks and not for search engines your ranking should improve.

You don’t even require to put effort into tailoring your content to work with latent schematic indexing. If you do the results will invariable be not up to what you may expect.

If you keep your content exclusive and on topic, you will be well on the way to fulfilling your goals.