Not necessary to have keywords in the page? Do you agree?
-
I am being told by my SEO consultants that:
"According to present Google algorithm it is not necessary to have keywords in the page. What is more required is the content is relevant to the page and whether visitors will stay on that page or not. If visitors stay for a longer time in your site it add bonus to the ranking of the site. So I think it is not necessary to add key phrases in the content."
Do you agree?
-
Thanks very much. Appreciate your detailed and documented response.
-
Sounds like your SEO consultant is taking a small fact and blowing it up to usefulness proportions.
Yes, while it is possible to rank for a given keyword without actually having the keyword on the page, the vast majority of the time the keyword - or a close variant - is found in several parts of the HTML. The most common place is the <title>tag, but other common locations include the body text, headers, alt image tags, meta descriptions and so on.</p> <p>Unless you have very good links pointing at your site that reference your keywords (either directly or possibly through co-citation) you face an uphill battle trying to rank for your given terms if you don't include the keyword in your content or other HTML elements.</p> <p>This is a highly studied concept. If you're interested in the raw data, you may want to check out SEOmoz's 2011 ranking factors:<a href="http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-6"> http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-6</a></p> <p>Or a more recent correlation study performed by the Open Algorythm. <a href="http://www.theopenalgorithm.com/correlation-data/on-page-factors/">http://www.theopenalgorithm.com/correlation-data/on-page-factors/</a></p> <p>Another area that may interest you is LDA, which stands for Latent Dirichlet Allocation. This refers to the relation of how certain keywords associated with one another are positively correlated with higher rankings. A company call Virante has created a couple of tools around this concept. You can find them <a href="http://ntopic.org/">here</a> and <a href="http://www.virante.org/seo-tools/lda-content-optimizer">here</a>.</p> <p>Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.</p></title>
-
Good distinction between authority and non-authority sites. Thanks for the advice.
-
Thanks. I do include them.
-
"Content is king" is the old saying in SEO and whilst content 'may' actually only be a prince or duke nowadays it is still very important unless your site is especially high authority.
If you dont include the keywords or variations of them that you wish to rank for you're going to struggle to rank for them. Logically if you dont have the word 'red widget' on the page you're unlikely to rank for it. If a page is about red widgets why would it not include the keyword 'red widget'? Again if your site is high authority then this isnt so applicable - www.cadbury.co.uk used to rank 1st for 'chocolate' and it didnt even have the word on the home page. How did they do it? Lots of links creating high authority and using chocolate anchor text.
There is however a not so fine line between including keywords in the content (including meta info, link text etc) and keyword stuffing. As Des in this thread mentions and as I just referred to 'meta info' under the umbrella of 'content' - if you dont have the keywords in your page title or meta description you're much less likely to get users to click on your search result as (most of the time) your page title & meta description is what is returned as your search result.
-
I read that article on citations, but how could that apply to small local sites with little position in the search engines?
-
certainly seems that Google is heading in that direction. How far it has gone is open to debate. Check out last Fridays' Whiteboard on the very subject.
I would still include keywords in title and meta - otherwise your CTR will decrease.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google not showing the recent cache info: How to know the last cached version of a page?
Hi, We couldn't able to see the last Google cached version of our homepage after March 29th. Just wondering why this is happening with other websites too. When we make some changes to the website, we will wait to our website indexed and cached, so the changes will have some ranking impact. Now we couldn't able to check if the website got indexed with changes. Is there any other way to check the latest cached version or time of last index? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
How Google distinguish and ignore keyword attested with or in a brand?
Hi community, Generally there will be a primary keyword which everybody concentrates and expect their homepage or website to rank for....like "seo" for seo consulting or seo tools. There might be some companies with this keyword in their brand name like "ABC SEO". So this primary keyword will be all over the website being part of the brand name; especially in page titles and header tags. How Google distinguish and ignores this keyword in brand name to avoid giving more ranking boost to such websites? Will this keyword will be completely ignored being the part of the company name or their domain name? How Google distinguish between a generic keyword and keyword in company name? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Meta Keywords is relevant in SEO yet ?
Hello, meta keywords is relevant to use in SEO yet? If yes, how many words is recommended to use? Regards, Leandro
Algorithm Updates | | lmoraes0 -
Lots of dublicate titles and pages on search page
I own a paiting website with a lot of searchable paintings. The "search paintings" feature creates tons of dublicate pages and titles. See here:
Algorithm Updates | | KasperGJ
http://www.maleribasen.dk/soegmaleri.asp I guess the problem is, that the URL can actually be different and still return the same content. First time you click the "Search paintings" the URL will shown as above. But as soon as users
begin to definere they search to the left and use the "Search button" the top URL changes. So, depending on how the top URL looks different results are shown. This is pretty standard in searches. But it returns tons of dublicate pages and titles. How, do you guys cope with that? Is there a clever way to use ref="cannonical" or some other smart way to avoid this? /Kasper0 -
Why am i not ranking in the top 50 for the keyword 'cocktails' even though all my other cocktail related keywords are in the first 2 pages of Google???
I have checked the first 50 pages of google for my website www.socialandcocktail.co.uk using the keyword 'cocktails'. It is NOT to be found. However, if I search for other keyword combinations eg cocktail recipes, cocktail bars etc they are all in the first 2 pages! What is going on????????
Algorithm Updates | | cocktailboss0 -
Would Google Remove Pages for Inactivity?
Hi, I've been watching the Total Indexed number for 4 domains that I work with for the last few months. In Google Webmaster Tools three of them were holding steady up until August-September, when suddenly they started declining by hundreds of thousands of URLs a week. I've asked my IT department and they say they haven't done anything technically different in the last few months that would affect indexation. I've also searched on google and on search marketing blogs to see if anyone else has experience this to no avail. As you can see in the image, the "Not Selected" pages have not increased so it appears this is not due to duplicate content (of which we have a lot). However, the "Ever Crawled" number is increasing. The only reasonable answer that I can conclude is that Google is now de-indexing inactive URLs? Anyone have a better answer? yIYDm.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | OfficeFurn0 -
Trying to figure out why one of my popular pages was de-indexed from Google.
I wanted to share this with everyone for two reasons. 1. To try to figure out why this happened, and 2 Let everyone be aware of this so you can check some of your pages if needed. Someone on Facebook asked me a question that I knew I had answered in this post. I couldn't remember what the url was, so I googled some of the terms I knew was in the page, and the page didn't show up. I did some more searches and found out that the entire page was missing from Google. This page has a good number of shares, comments, Facebook likes, etc (ie: social signals) and there is certainly no black / gray hat techniques being used on my site. This page received a decent amount of organic traffic as well. I'm not sure when the page was de-indexed, and wouldn't have even known if I had't tried to search for it via google; which makes me concerned that perhaps other pages are being de-indexed. It also concerns me that I have done something wrong (without knowing) and perhaps other pages on my site are going to be penalized as well. Does anyone have any idea why this page would be de-indexed? It sure seems like all the signals are there to show Google this page is unique and valuable. Interested to hear some of your thoughts on this. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | NoahsDad0 -
Why would my keywords never ranking in Bing but have great position in both Google and Yahoo?
I have several keywords ranking top 5 for Google and Yahoo but nothing from Bing. Any ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | CIEEwebTeam0