Keywords-Everything You Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask

In today’s day and age, most businesses have at least some form of web presence. This is because based on a 2016 report on the role of search in making decisions about Products, Brands, and Services, more than 93% of consumers use an internet search when making buying decisions. In fact, a 2017 Search Engine Journal Report said 51% of all traffic comes from organic search results, and a whopping 91.5% of all traffic is generated by sites that appear on page one. With those statistics it makes sense to have an SEO-optimized website based on specific keywords, or you risk losing out on a large percentage of potential sales.

When it comes to websites, I think of them like retail stores. Just as you can have a store that sells great products for a great price, if your store is not located where the traffic is, the store will flounder.

Many businesses will work really hard to build a great looking and functioning website but ignore optimizing it for the proper keywords. As s a result, these websites get little or no traffic and the business flounders.

As a business owner, you owe it to your business to make sure your website is where people can find it and not on some side street away from the public eye. To make your website visible to the public, it needs to be found and indexed by the search engines and to be properly indexed by major search engines to show up in the right search queries, you need to focus on your keywords.

Keywords are not something that you tell a search engine directly anymore. Instead, keywords are words or phrases that you use when you create your content to help search engines discover for themselves what the page is about. So how do search engines know what are your keywords? Many times, it is based on their density.

Keyword Density

Remember the goal of any search engine is to return a list of pages in its search results that the user expects to see. To do that, search engines crawl a page and look at the content for clues to try to determine what the page is really all about. A page could be a blog post, landing page, home page, or any other page on your website.

Words that are used fairly often give the search engines a pretty good clue about the focus of a piece of content. When you use keywords in your title, as headers, in your descriptions and several times in the content, the search engine will assume that the subject of the page is your keyword.

With a keyword density that is too high, a search engine may think that you are just keyword stuffing and may penalize the page. On the flip side, if your keyword density is too low, the search engines may never find out what the page is about, which is not good either. Remember, although you should try to make the focus of a page obvious to search engines using keywords, a real person will use your content to make a decision and therefore it must read naturally.

While there is no one-size-fits-all keyword density percentage, tools like Yoast SEO use a focus keyword field and indicate the density and make recommendations. When it comes to keyword density, it has a lot to do with the density of other pages that search engines assume are also ranking for the same keyword.

If the average keyword density is 1% and your page has a 2% density, the search engine may penalize the page. Likewise, for another page with another keyword where the average keyword density is 3% and yours is only 2%, the search engine may rank your page lower for having too few occurrences of your keyword. So there is no correct answer when it comes to keyword density- it all depends on where your page fits density-wise, with respect to all the other pages trying to rank for the same keyword.

SEO experts report that what they see most often when analyzing their client’s content is not that the keyword density is too high, but rather that it is too low.

Here is what Matt Cutts of Google has to say about keyword density

Long-Tail Keywords in SEO

When we use the word Keyword, we are most often not talking about a single word like “shoes.” Single-word keywords are very competitive and will cost you too much time and money to rank for.

For example, a Google search for the keyword “shoes” produces 3.5 billion result pages. Instead, think about keywords as the words you might enter into a search field, or say, for a voice search on Siri, Amazon Echo, or Google Assistant.

When most people refer to keywords, they are really talking about what is more accurately called long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords contain several related words. For example, “Newton Running Shoes” produced just 8.5 million results. This long-tail keyword is much more specific and would be much easier to rank for because each word helps to make the keyword a little more specific.

Shoes could encompass boots, dress, and athletic shoes. Adding the word “running” makes the keyword a bit more specific, and adding the brand ”Newton” makes it more specific still. In fact, you may even want to make such a keyword even more specific by adding a gender such as “Men’s Newton Running Shoes”. A Google search for “Men’s Newton Running Shoes” returned only 97 results, and would be very easy for you to rank for.

Latent Semantic Analysis

Search engines like Google use what is known as Latent Semantic Analysis in their complex algorithms to improve the accuracy of search results.

Earlier technologies struggled with using synonyms to characterizes natural language. Specifically, search engines had a hard time with changes in meanings that came with how the word was used.

For example, the word “labor” could mean human resources, effort, or it could be what a woman goes through to give birth. With a Latent Semantic Analysis, related words in your content are used to help the search engines understand the meaning of keywords. If “labor” and “employee” existed in your content, the search engine might assume that you are talking about labor as the people a business hires. If “labor” and the word “toil” co-existed in the same content, the search engine would infer that labor was related to effort, and if “labor” and “birth” or “baby” co-existed, the context of labor likely referred to childbirth.

So when it comes to finding keywords, search engines are pretty good at discovering your intent as a content creator even if you use different terms throughout your content or use words that need more context to discover their ultimate meaning.

How can you use your understanding of Long-Tail Keywords, Keyword Density, and Latent Semantic Analysis to improve how search engines find your content?

Peter Kent, the author of the book “SEO for Dummies” also has a Udemy course. Peter has graciously offered our readers a special discount coupon code to take his “Complete SEO Training with Top SEO Expert Peter Kent” course. The course consists of 158 lectures and includes eight hours of video.

This post is a summary of many of Peter’s lessons and was reviewed by my own SEO maven, a recognized SEO company, to ensure the accuracy of the content of this post.