November 3, 2006 I often speak of the importance of content on a site for SEO. In these talks, the question of placing a certain term on a site a certain amount of times to prove relevancy comes up. This usually sparks in interesting conversation that I will share here…
On-Page-Optimization. First things first. The idea of optimizing a website is taken to levels that it shouldn’t necessarily go. When I say to someone «I will optimize your site,» I don’t mean to improve the rankings in the search engines, I mean to help improve crawlability (I think I just made up a word) and show the search engines what the site is about effectively. This is all in an attempt to achieve better «relevance» than the other sites in competition. If your site starts to seem as if you are doing something solely for the search engines to rank you higher, they will not. Search engines are in competition with each other to pull up the most relevant results. So a site should be created with the customer or visitor in mind, not the search engines. So, in optimizing a site, we don’t want to do it for the benefit of the search engines, we want to do it for our customers and make it appropriate for the search engines.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). In an ever growing struggle to bring «relevant» results, search engines (read Google) are making use of a technology known as Latent Semantic Indexing. This means that an algorithm will find sites that deal in the most relevant subject matter, even if certain terms don’t appear on the page. For example:
- In an AP news wire database, a search for Saddam Hussein returns articles on the Gulf War, UN sanctions, the oil embargo, and documents on Iraq that do not contain the Iraqi president’s name at all.
- Looking for articles about Tiger Woods in the same database brings up many stories about the golfer, followed by articles about major golf tournaments that don’t mention his name. Constraining the search to days when no articles were written about Tiger Woods still brings up stories about golf tournaments and well-known players.
- In an image database that uses LSI indexing, a search on Normandy invasion shows images of the Bayeux tapestry — the famous tapestry depicting the Norman invasion of England in 1066, the town of Bayeux, followed by photographs of the English invasion of Normandy in 1944.
— Insert from www.knowledgesearch.org**
So this means that a site doesn’t really need to have a term a certain amount of times on a site to appear in a search result. You just have to be the most «relevant.» This is obviously not the end all to optimization. There are still a great number of factors involved, but keep this in mind when thinking of the question, «how many times should I put ‘keyword’ on my site?» The answer is, speak on the subject, make the content relevant, and create the site for the consumer.
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