The Truth About Keywords and SEO

The Truth About Keywords and SEO

Can keywords make or break the success of your online content?

Here’s some valuable info to help you maximize your SEO efforts. When it comes to SEO and keyword theory, there’s a LOT of information out there, and it is very confusing. Implementing keyword strategy can be a very daunting task, and figuring out the most important keyword variables is a challenging endeavor. Here we will outline three of the most important variables to keep in mind when developing your SEO-enhanced content and advise you on how to best put your new SEO game plan into action.

Keyword Prominence

Keyword prominence is placing your most important keywords in the most important parts of your page. Success with this variable can best be achieved by placing your most valuable keywords in the best “real-estate” on your web pages, such as your H1, H2 and H3 tags, anchor text, and alt text. The earlier on your page that your keywords appear, the better. Another approach is taking the words you want to emphasize the most and using distinct fonts or color to set them apart from the rest of your content.

Keyword prominence is a crucial component to your SEO process, but it’s also important not to get carried away; you don’t want your website to look like a “font bomb” exploded in it! Put most of your focus into headlines and tags, add a few bold words or anchor links, and you should be in good shape. If done correctly, it should help you achieve better rankings and stronger click-through rates.

Keyword Frequency

Keyword frequency is the number of times your keywords appear in a webpage(s). In the early days of SEO, frequency consisted of using as many keywords as possible as often as possible, crossing your fingers, and hoping for the best results. This approach, known as keyword stuffing, not only cut down on readability, it also became a technique frowned upon by the major search engines and is now a huge “no-no” in SEO practice.

While keywords DO need to be used a certain number of times throughout your page, it’s important that they appear naturally and fit with the content seamlessly. Dropping keywords into your content indiscriminately will result in driving both readers and search engines away from your site. Most experts recommend using a keyword density ration from 2-7% in your webpage content.

Keyword Proximity

Keyword proximity means keeping your keywords as close to each other as possible. Think about how you look-up things on search engines; you likely enter in identifying words together to find what you’re looking for, and don’t use “filler” words like “the” or “and” in between them. This is the same approach that should be employed when creating your web content. Keywords should be placed together and should also be located at the top of the page, in headings and titles.

Filler words (sometimes called “stop words”) are words that carry no value on search engines and using too many of them between your keywords will prove detrimental to your SEO rankings. Search engines prefer to find keywords and phrases as they are typed into the search box, so maximizing your content structure to reflect this logic will result in better rankings, crawl rates, and CTR percentages.