SEO Expert Secrets: Going Beyond Keywords

We all know that keyword and keyword phrases are the foundation of the search engine optimization process, but today we will journey into a world beyond the visible keyword universe.

Well let’s face it, the search engines are getting better and better at figuring out relevant and the irrelevant pages, and the bad one are slowly getting weaned out. Search engines use complex algorithms and methods like LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) to determine the relevancy and ranking of the page against the keyword typed by the user. Methods like LSI examine the content of the page as a whole, rather than trying to locate specific keywords placed strategically on the page (which has been prone to manipulation).

This means that search engines do not require an exact match of your keyword phrase to find relevant pages. I am not saying that placing your keyword in the Meta tags, title, description, link text, heading tags and body content is not important for SEO, but rather that SEO experts will soon have to think beyond the standard keyword optimization of pages to achieve desired ranking results.

What this means for your online business is that search engines will determine the relevancy of your page/keyword based on the content of the page as a whole using semantically close words, related words, similar phrases, and the relationships between the words to determine the relevancy and ranking for the page. At the end of the day, it’s anyone’s guess what the search engines will change or do next, but by following certain basic seo principles and good content practices you can safeguard yourself against.

So it’s not just your keyword that’s important, it’s the right combination of all the words in your content that will matter eventually. Keep in mind the simple rule that the content of your page should have the right supporting context to support your keyphrase (s).

While you don’t need to understand in depth the technologies and methodologies used by search engines, you do need to understand what impact they will have on your online business.

So how does this affect your online business? It forces you to write more relevant and more compelling content. This is good for your business because you'll have content that generates more traffic and conversions and it’s good for the search engines because it increases the quality of the content in their indexes.

In your business is visibility in the search engines, targeted traffic and high rankings for your keywords important to you? Then you need to re-evaluate your seo content strategy and its impact on your search marketing goals.

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SEO Expert Secrets: One Keyword per Page

I have mentioned several times in my previous posts that it’s best to target one keyword phrase per page but there may be situations where you may need to place two keyword phrases on one page.

There are many different opinions about this technique in the seo world, and many top ranked sites have a long list of keywords stuffed into the keyword tag on each page. There are many reasons why these sites with multiple keywords could be ranking high, like quality and number of links, link reputation and sometimes even age of the domain.

But I ask you, if you were a search engine which would you prefer, a page with one keyword and the Meta tags and body content of the page focused around that keyword, or multiple keywords on a page with no focus.

Assuming you are onboard with me on this (or just feel like reading further) let’s see how we can optimize two keywords on one page!

An example:

On a page offering seo content services, you may want to target the keyword phrase seo content services and seo friendly content services. It hardly makes sense to create another page focused around seo friendly content services, and yet we want our page to be set for the exact match, as well as the inexact match.

To explain further, though our primary focus is to target users typing seo content services, we also don’t want to lose out on users typing in seo friendly content services. At the end of the day one never really knows what the user will type in exactly while searching for products and services you offer, but if a user types in seo friendly content services, and if your page is optimized for that exact keyword phrase, it would rank higher than a page that is optimized around seo content services only.

SEO Expert Secret Tip

If you had just one keyword phrase, you would have placed that keyword phrase in the Meta tags like title, description, heading tags, link text, image names (works for some engines) and in the body content of the page.

In case of two keyword phrases for a page, we would have the Primary Keyword phrase, and the Secondary keyword phrase that needs to be placed strategically on one page.

The Primary keyword phrase is used in the title, other Meta tags (except in the description tag) and in one well written sentence in the upper content on the page.

The Secondary keyword phrase is used in the Meta tags (description tag only, and what work nicely into the writing), and in one well written sentence each in the content on the page. After that use the individual words in both the keyword phrases within the content for that page as they fall naturally and reads well.

There, now you have the secret to working with two keywords in one page.

Also Read:

Mumbai SEO Expert Series - Keywords Part 1
Mumbai SEO Expert Series - Keywords Part 2
Mumbai SEO Expert Series - Keywords Part 3
Mumbai SEO Expert Series - Keywords Part 4
Mumbai SEO Expert Series - Keywords Part 5
Keyword Placement Strategy

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