Everything You Need To Know About Keywords In Seo - article by Good English Article Sites

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758

Summary:

This articles explains everything you need to know about keywords and key-phrases in SEO. From keyword density and prominence, to strategies on how to deal with keyword ambiguity.

Keywords:

keyword, seo, keyphrase, density, keyword prominence

Article Body:

<strong>Density and Prominence</strong>

<p>Keyword density is a measure of how much emphasis (weight) a

keyword is given within the content of a page. Most of the emphasis

of a page is assigned to the text at the start of the page, at the

end of the page and within these tags: &lt;title&gt;, &lt;h1&gt;,

&lt;a&gt;, &lt;img alt="" /&gt;, &lt;strong&gt; and &lt;em&gt; (up

to 3 or 4 times).</p>

<p>Never waste a precious strong/em tag on content that isn&rsquo;t

a bunch of keywords. You can use CSS to achieve any visual effect

you want. You should only use those tags to put emphasis on a

keyword/key-phrase.</p>

<p>Keyword prominence is a measure of how important a word is

within its context &ndash; in other words, how close it is to the

beginning of the sentence. E.g.: the word &lsquo;car&rsquo; is more

prominent in &lsquo;car sale London&rsquo; (at the start) than in

&lsquo;London car sale&rsquo; (at the end).</p>

<p>Keyword prominence and density are 2 concepts applied to every

aspect of your website: URLs, headings, keywords, links, etc. Keep

these 2 ideas in mind as you read through the rest of this article

&ndash; they apply to absolutely everything.</p>

<strong>Keywords/Key-phrases</strong>

<p>A keyword is any word that accurately describes your content. A

key-phrase is a combination of keywords.</p>

<p>Stop words are those considered too &lsquo;common&rsquo; or

&lsquo;vague&rsquo;, which are ignored in search terms (with

exceptions, but let&rsquo;s leave it at that for this article). You

may think they&rsquo;re harmless since they&rsquo;re ignored, but

stop words can be seriously damage your SEO strategy by occupying a

huge amount of keyword density and prominence within key-phrases in

titles, headings, URLs, links, etc&hellip; Example:</p>

<p style="margin-left: 36pt;">Car sales in London = car sales has

50% density, 100% prominence Car sales London = car sales has 66%

density, 100% prominence London car sales = car sales has 66%

density, 66% prominence</p>

<p>When writing up key-phrases, try to write in a newspaper

headline style and miss out common words such as &lsquo;the&rsquo;,

&lsquo;a&rsquo;, &lsquo;on&rsquo;, &lsquo;of, &lsquo;in&rsquo;,

&lsquo;you&rsquo;, &lsquo;me&rsquo;, &lsquo;he&rsquo;,

&lsquo;it&rsquo;, etc&hellip;</p>

<p>PS.: There are too many stop words in the English language so I

won&rsquo;t put a list here, but I do have a list if anyone wants

it.</p>

<strong>Keyword Ambiguity</strong>

<p>Search engines are aware of these ambiguities so you'd only be

shooting yourself in the foot if you tried to cover both. Take

"<a href=

"http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=spell&amp;resnum=0&amp;ct=result&amp;cd=1&amp;q=xmas+trees+delivered&amp;spell=1"

target="_blank">xmas trees delivered</a> " and "<a href=

"http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&amp;q=christmas+trees+delivered&amp;btnG=Search&amp;meta="

target="_blank">christmas trees delivered</a> " for example. The

word <i>xmas</i> never appears the site's content, but

pinesandneedles.com still ranks top for either of these 2 search

phrases. I find this difficult to explain, but here's why:<i>(using

xmas, christmas and some imaginary numbers)</i></p>

<p style="margin-right: 36pt; margin-left: 36pt;"><u>When you are

strict and avoid ambiguity:</u> Let's say that you only use

"christmas" throughout the site, it ends up with a prominance of

10. (<i>just some number to illustrate this example</i> ). When a

user searches for something with the word "xmas", the search

engines will consider both "xmas" and "christmas" equaliy, so you

end up being a very likely match for their search.<br>

<br>

<u>When you go with the flow and cover every possibility:</u> Let's

say you've used the words 'xmas' and 'christmas' equaly thorought

the website and they each end up with prominance 5. (<i>just some

number to illustrate this example, but smaller than the number on

the previous example</i> ) When a user searches for something with

the word "xmas", the search engines will consider both "xmas" and

"christmas", but you are not as likely to match either, because

you've distributed the prominence between 2 phrases.</p>

<p>When it comes to ambiguous words, it's always best to leave the

search engines to deal with it their own way. Just do your bit by

being clear and consistent.</p>

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