OntoSearch

The web is all about content. Finding success in the search business is all about putting the right content in front of the correct user at the correct time. How do they do this? Keywords!

There is no denying that all of the well-liked search engines accessible today have come a long way from merely counting links and words on pages.

Images, videos, pdfs, flash and other rich media are also being indexed these days along with text-based pages… but the fact remains, users still search using keywords. This is why it’s essential not to drop the ball when it comes to keyword strategy and optimising each and every element on every page.

There’s so a lot much more to optimisation these days than simply making positive that sufficient keywords appear on a page.

Debunking the myth: there is an optimal keyword density

Be quite suspicious of SEOs who tell you that the correct keyword density for a key-phrase is between 3% and 8% (or any percentage for that matter). This is just not true.

Naturally, you cannot hope to rank for a keyword or key-phrase if it does not appear anywhere on your internet site. Nevertheless, sheer volume of keywords is not the secret to great rankings.

Quite a few optimisation specialists acknowledge that keyword densities play no role in how commercial search engines process text, index documents or assign weights to keywords.

Indeed, keyword density says nothing about a document’s relevance to a search. It is completely separate from a document’s quality or semantics, and as a result, relevance to a specific topic.

Search engines use complex algorithms with a number of weighted variables to calculate the rankings of sites relative to a particular search term. In fact, in any kind of automated information retrieval or text-mining, a weighting system is used.

It’s truly far more about weighting than repetition

This weighting is most commonly presented as a tf-idf (term frequency-inverse document frequency) weight. This is a statistical measure which evaluates how crucial a word is to a document or a corpus of details.

The basic principle is that the significance of any given word increases proportionally to the number of times the word appears in a document; nevertheless this is offset by the number of times the word appears in the corpus, or body of documents.

Thus, tf-idf is a fairly efficient way to rank a page’s relevance to a given user query.

Know your corpus

What does this mean for your content? Well, when thinking about the frequency of a keyword in a document, the best approach from a strategic point of view is to seek to be as natural as feasible.

In other words, if you are attempting to optimise your page for “PVC paint” – you ought to take into account what the normal frequency of usage is for that word in the pages that rank well for a search for that phrase.

Naturally when it comes to ordering pages in the search engine results pages, the tf-idf weight is not the only variable considered in the algorithm, and aspects such as latent semantic indexing undoubtedly play a pivotal role in determining a document’s relevance to a search term too.

Regrettably, since no SEO has insights into the exact mechanics and specifics of any search engine’s algorithms, the most they can do is to strive to be the least imperfect.

Keyword technique is still crucial

This does not negate the significance of having a proper keyword strategy in location – such as thorough keyword study and allocation.

Segmentation is a really essential component of any keyword technique. You want to have a clear structure in location for both your human visitors and the search engine bots. Feel carefully about your subject matter and develop focused, relevant and original content around those areas.

The bottom line is: websites which are clearly structured consistently outrank those which are not – even if they cover similar subject matter.

A couple of closing points

There is far too a lot danger of being labelled a spammer if you stuff your content with keywords. Steer clear of black-hat SEO tactics such as hidden text and try to maintain things natural.

It’s often finest to keep the user in mind when writing content. Natural word usage, solid data architecture and special content will undoubtedly pay dividends in the end.