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
-
Internal pages ranking over the homepage: How to optimise to rank better at Google?
Hi, We have experienced a shift in SERP from internal pages ranking over website homepage for more than a year. Previously website homepages used to rank for the primary keyword like moz.com for "SEO". Now we can see that internal pages like moz.com/learn/seo/what-is-seo been ranking for the primary keyword "SEO". Google is picking up these "what is ABC" pages than the homepage. All our competitor sites are ranking with these internal pages which are about "what is (primary keyword)". We do have the same internal pages "what is....", but this pages is not ranking; only our homepage is ranking. Moreover we dropped more than 15 positions after this shift in SERP. How to diagnose this? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
What date tags are required/best to use for articles or other landing pages?
Does anyone have suggestions on which date tag(s) are most important to use and how to use them on the frontend? (i.e. dateModified, dateCreated, and datePublished). The Structured Data Testing Tool is coming up with errors for my article pages, but I'm a bit confused which ones should be in the code vs. showing on the frontend.
Algorithm Updates | | ElsaT0 -
Website and landing pages - Proportionate authority
Does website's (homepage) ranking going to influence landing pages ranking or vice-versa? If the homepage is ranking good for a "keyword", will that improve ranking of other landing pages which are optimised for related "keywords" & Vice-versa?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Question About : Redirecting Old Pages to New & More Relevant Ones
I'm looking over a friends website, which used to have great natural ranking for some big keywords. Those ranking & CTR's have dropped a lot, so the next thing I checked into was top selling Brand & Category pages. Its seems like every year or so a New Page was constructed for each brand... Many of which have high quality and natural inbound links. However, the pages no longer have products and simply look outdated. I'm trying to figure out if they should place redirects on all the old pages to a new URL which is more seo friendly. Example Links : http://www.xyz.com/nike2004.html , http://www.xyz.com/nike-spring2006.html , http://www.xyz.com/2011-nike-shoes.html - (have quality inbound links, bad content) .... Basically would it be advantageous to place redirects on all of these example pages to a new one that will be more permanent... http://www.xyz.com/nike-shoes.html I'm also looking at about 15 brands and maybe 100+ old/outdated urls, so I wasn't sure if I should do this & to what extent. Considering many of the brand pages do rank, but not as well as they should... Any input would help, thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
Should social widgets be the kind that shares/likes a page, or the kind that adds followers to a brand social page?
I'm wondering if the social widgets on my blog should create a share/like referencing the page or should the social widget create a follower to my brands page on a particular social network? Any ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | salesduke0 -
Large number of thin content pages indexed, affect overall site performance?
Hello Community, Question on negative impact of many virtually identical calendar pages indexed. We have a site that is a b2b software product. There are about 150 product-related pages, and another 1,200 or so short articles on industry related topics. In addition, we recently (~4 months ago) had Google index a large number of calendar pages used for webinar schedules. This boosted the indexed pages number shown in Webmaster tools to about 54,000. Since then, we "no-followed" the links on the calendar pages that allow you to view future months, and added "no-index" meta tags to all future month pages (beyond 6 months out). Our number of pages indexed value seems to be dropping, and is now down to 26,000. When you look at Google's report showing pages appearing in response to search queries, a more normal 890 pages appear. Very few calendar pages show up in this report. So, the question that has been raised is: Does a large number of pages in a search index with very thin content (basically blank calendar months) hurt the overall site? One person at the company said that because Panda/Penguin targeted thin-content sites that these pages would cause the performance of this site to drop as well. Thanks for your feedback. Chris
Algorithm Updates | | cogbox0 -
Ecommerce good/bad? Showing product description on sub/category page?
Hi Mozers, I have a ecommerce furniture website, and I have been wondering for some time if showing the product descriptions on the sub/category page helps the website. If there is more content displayed on the subcategory, it should be more relevant, right? OR does it not matter, as it is duplicate content from the product page. I think showing the product descriptions on non-product pages is hurting my design/flow, but i worry that if I am to hide product content on sub/category pages my traffic will be hurt. Despite my searches I have not found an answer yet. Please take a look at my site and share your thoughts: http://www.ecustomfinishes.com/ Chris 27eVz
Algorithm Updates | | longdenc_gmail.com0 -
Google showing different pages for same search term in uk and usa
Hi Guys, I have an interesting question and think Google is being a bit strange.. Can anyone tell me why when I input the term design agency in Google.co.uk it shows one page, but when i tyupe in the same search term in Google.com (worldwide search) it shows another page.. Any ideas guys? Is this not bit strange?? Any help here be much appreciated.. Thanks Gareth
Algorithm Updates | | GAZ090