SEO – TRUTH, MYTH, and LIES – PART 5
Keywords and Their Importance
If you have spent anytime researching what it takes for a website to succeed with SEO, you have no doubt heard the term “Keywords”. Just how important are these “keywords” and how much time should you spend focusing on them?
The Truth
Keywords are important, to a degree. If you are going to develop and market a website selling coffee cups, it will not help if you write articles talking about children’s toys, the two have nothing in common. So it stands to reason you will use the words Coffee and Cups in your website’s content.
The Myth
I actually read an article that was placed on another website that was put out earlier this month, that stated you should include smart keywords in your heading, your first paragraphs, your subheadings, and in your anchor text.
This could not be further from the truth. At one time this was a short cut way to spoof the search engines. Doing this today is one of the quicker ways to have your site rankings demoted. The mere fact that there are still SEO companies, and SEO experts providing this sort of advice and service, is one of the reasons why our company is doing so well in the SEO marketplace.
The Lie
You Must Have Keywords All Through Your Content. This is simply not true, and here is the proof. Go to Google and type in the phrase examples of sites that doesn’t use keywords. Within the first 3 or 4 results is the following URL: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=79812. This is an entire article written about site rankings, but you will not find the term Keyword anywhere in the article. You will not find it in the heading, the meta-description, the paragraph text, or anchor text, yet this page comes up when you google a term about keywords. Why is this?
In an effort to cut down on spam, provide relevant search titles, and not give weight to low-quality SEO practices, search engines, not just Google, are looking at the actual content within a website and the context in which that content is presented. Back to our coffee cup example. If you are writing a article on Coffee Cups, it stands to reason you are going to talk about Coffee, temperature, dishwasher safe, the materials the cups are made out of etc. You are not just going to have an article were the word or term Coffee Cups is used over and over.
Further more, search engines now compare your website to other sites within your niche category. It stands to reason that if you are talking about a particular topic, there are natural phrases and words that are used to describe your niche. The search engines compare your site with others, and if you are using common secondary words and phrases when describing your product or talking about subject, then chances are you are an authority on that topic.
Remember the golden rule, write your content for your audience, NOT for the search engines.
Tomorrow we will be looking more about Link Building and keyword anchor text, and why you should avoid most of these services at all costs.
