SEO Strategies – Keyword Proximity

You may have given a lot of thought to what keywords are most effective for SEO of your website and liberally included them throughout the pages, but have you considered Keyword Proximity?

Just as all links are not created equally, neither are the various uses of a keyword or phrase. Where you place them is just as important as how often you include them in your content and meta tags.

What Is Keyword Proximity

Keyword proximity refers to how close together the words are. You might have a list of keywords relevant to your website that includes fishing pole, fishing equipment, tackle boxes, and custom fishing rods, for instance. Great. But how do you place them to be most effective in terms of Search Engine Optimisation?

Let’s say you write a blog post about the equipment your company sells. Title one might read: “Lure in the Biggest Fish with These Custom Made Rods”. Okay, that’s good, but consider a rephrasing of the title to read “Custom Fishing Rods: An Important Piece of Fishing Equipment”.

If someone is doing an internet search for “custom fishing rod”, or even “fishing equipment” they are more likely to find your post using the second title rather than the first. That is because the keywords are all bunched together to form a phrase someone would actually input in the search engine box.

Making Keyword Proximity Work

Keyword Proximity is applicable to nearly all parts of your website, not just the titles or articles or posts. It is a factor that influences how search engines find the content of your site, the meta tags, headlines, page title, and descriptions.

Try to avoid using filler words in between keyword phrases, such as “and”, “the”, “your”, etc. These get in the way of the true phrase you are optimising for. In the example above, the word “made” is actually a filler word in the first title because few people would perform a search for “custom made rod”. Instead, they would probably just put in custom rod, or custom fishing rod. Getting rid of additional, unnecessary words makes your online content more likely to be found. Some search engines ignore these words as “white noise” but where you can make use of multiple phrases without that noise, do so!

Consider also reversing your keyword phrases. Perhaps you are located in Perth and you are geo-targeting local customers with the keywords of “Perth fishing equipment suppliers”. You could also consider using “Fishing equipment suppliers Perth” because that is a more natural way for people to search.

It doesn’t make it particularly easy to write content with such an awkward phrase, but it does make for a good SEO strategy and while you’re writing content you can exercise some creative muscles working to get that phrase sounding natural.

Remember that these same concepts apply to the page title. If your main web page is entitled “Supplying the best fishing equipment and tackle in Perth” then you are not properly optimising. It’s those pesky filler words again. Try changing the title to “Best Fishing Equipment – Perth”. Use this same phrase in the alt text, header tags, and H1 tag then again in the first sentence of written content, at least one other occurrence in the following paragraphs, and in the first sentence of the last paragraph. This could help you to achieve optimum benefit from your keywords.

Chances are it won’t take more than a bit of tweaking to change the order of your keywords so that they are all grouped together, in close proximity. Try applying these Keyword Proximity tips and then analyse the difference in your page ranking. You may be surprised at how high it climbs.

Have a most outstanding day.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketing
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008 - 2010