Google keywords

[ithvac]

I'm having trouble understanding how google determines out of my text what are the keywords and what aren't. Is there somewhere I can go that will tell me what google sees as my dominant keywords and I'd like to see my total keyword list too. We are running eCommerce and I don't think it is picking up on everything we expected it to see as keywords. I'm pretty new to this SEO stuff but I'm trying to learn. Any help would be appreciated. I understand I'm suppose to include important words in my page titles, headers and meta description and use effective markup as well so I'm just a bit lost on how I can actually see what google counts as my keywords and their level of power/importance. If this isn't possible if anyone has any suggestions on how to gauge this, I'm open to ideas! Thanks in advance guys!

[MichaelC-15022]

There isn't a fixed, known answer to your question, but perhaps I can offer some guidelines.

First off, repeating your keyword over and over on the page is very unlikely to fool Google any more, and boost your ranking.  On a page with 1000 words, it might be natural to see the primary term the page is about repeated a dozen or so times; if it appears 100+ times, Google is very unlikely to decide that makes the page MORE relevant for that term, and more likely, Google will see that as an indicator of spam.  My advice: write naturally, and don't try to inject the keywords...just make sure they appear once or twice.

In page titles, the answer is in the SERPs themselves.  Do a search for a reasonably competitive term, e.g. "Nikon D5200".  None of the page 1 results have the term in the page title more than once.

[ithvac]

How many times and where can I use a keyword before google rules us as over optimizing? I saw the dispute over using the keyword in the title and in H1 and if that was disputable I'm not sure how often I can use a certain keyword on a page.

[SEO5Team]

One of the best tools to check how well a page is optimized for a particular keyword is the Moz On Page Grader Tool.

All you need to do is to enter the URL and the keyword you want that page optimized for , hit the "Grade on page optimization icon and the tool will give you an overall grade based on your optimization efforts for that keyword on the page. They take a lot of important factors into account including:

• Rel Cannonical Usage
• Page Title
• Accessibility
• Keyword usage in the document
• Content Length
• Links
• Header Tags

It's such a powerful tool. You can basically run this tool for the top 10 URL's ranking for your target keyword and see how the competitors are faring on this tool and what you can do to improve your position.

[MichaelC-15022]

There are a number of things that Google looks at to determine how relevant your page is to a certain keyword phrase:

• presence of keyword phrase in page title
• presence of keyword phrase in URL
• presence of keyword phrase in domain
• presence of keyword phrase in body text
• presence of keyword phrase in image ALT text and image filenames on the page
• presence of keyword phrase in both internal and external links to the page

Meta description isn't really considered by Google in terms of relevance/ranking, but of course it's what's shown to the user in the search results as the "snippet" from the page, below the page title--so it can affect your conversion (from showing in search results to clicks through to your site).

Typically, you'll want to identify a primary target keyword phrase for each page, and make sure your page title STARTS with that phrase; make that phrase be part of your URL (after removing punctuation and special characters, and replacing spaces with hyphens), make your H1 heading on the page contain that phrase, have the phrase appear a couple of times on the page in the body text, and have an image or two that has the phrase in its ALT text and also the image filename.

Page title is probably the most important here (assuming your domain name isn't an exact match for the keyword--that tends to be REALLY strong still).