The next big step for search engine optimizers has arrived according to Google. In recent months, Google has increased the weight of keywords related to a search query. In the old days, when you searched for a specific keyword on Google, only specific instances of that keyword counted toward a website’s ranking in the search results. This brought up ideals like keyword density percentages, where on the page keywords appear, and what type of page elements they appeared on. It seems that the way marketers approach search engine optimization is changing.
Keyword density weight is the first obvious item to lose value when talking about latent semantic indexing. If you limit yourself to a single keyword and target a specific keyword density like you used to in the old days, you’re likely not going to get the same results you used to. This is because the weight of related keywords on a page has increased and this affects the ranking of all related keywords on the page. It may seem confusing at first, but it’s a heroic effort to clean up search results and return pages more relevant to the search query.
To better understand what’s going on here, let’s say you’re looking for shoes. You go to Google and type the word “running shoes” and start clicking through the results. In the old days, you could get more articles and pages that focused on the words “running” and “sneakers,” but you wouldn’t see many results for running shoes, tennis shoes, basketball shoes, or sneakers. The search results would heavily weight the actual words “jogging” and “shoes” producing very limited results. When you consider words related to “sneakers,” you open the door for pages to appear in search results that have “sneakers” in the content, as well as many other types of shoes. The end result tends to be more end user friendly as the results produce higher quality pages and better options for the query.
If you look at this from a marketing perspective, your job will be a bit more difficult if you’ve simply been stuffing keywords onto your pages to get rankings. Now the proverbial tables have turned, and search engines are forcing websites to not only include the keyword they are trying to rank for, but also to include content on related keywords. You also can’t just use a thesaurus and try to manipulate the results, because one of the factors of latent semantic indexing is how closely related keywords are in the context of the search query.
So what does it all mean? It means that quality content is king. Not just happy anymore. If you want to have a successful marketing campaign for your website, you need to throw out the old keyword density tool and start looking for related keywords. You can find latently related keywords in Google by placing the “~” symbol in front of the desired keyword. Google will highlight related keywords latently so you know which ones to use. But be careful and don’t fall back into a numbers game. Write good content and the search engines will reward your efforts.
Search engine optimization has changed, but those of us who have focused on quality content from the start should see an increase in search result rankings. It is always better to stay ahead when it comes to search engine marketing. Remember, some things will always be true when it comes to search engines: quality content written around multiple keywords is better, variable anchor text for inbound links is better, links from authority sites are the best and the more you contribute to the web, the more you get back. It really is better to give than to receive.