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.
About Sean Rasmussen
Sean
I knew about keyword proximity and using related keywords. Does the same applied for related links?
Very handy little trick here. Also remember the human reader though, when applying this. If you can balance both the bot and human reader needs, that’s ideal.
Hi Sean,
I don’t think I’m getting the concept of keyword proximity right. I think I use too many filler words to make it easier to write the keyword phrase into my content. I will have to give more thought to the way I write my keyword phrase.
I need to work on this SEO strategy.
I never thought about filler words or that they may hurt my keywords. This is an area where I definitely need some better understanding in regards to SEO. Even though this may be a very simple concept, I feel many people probably have a hard time with it for some reason. I also have been thinking that I need more keywords in the actual content itself that I’ve posted in my blog. Thanks for this information Sean. One good thing about continually educating yourself in your marketing efforts is that you are continually reminded of things you need to do. This will hopefully insure that someday one would finally implement these skills and then become second nature to their blogging.
Well explained but what about long tail keywords where putting the keyphrase together may look unreadable for the visitor? For example “swivel office leather stools” and all variations of the same keyphrase.
What If I want to optimize for hundreds of keyphrases where putting together all phrases may look unreadable and annoying.
For example this paragraph “Swivel office leather stools made of the best quality raw material in the market. Leather office stools for all purposes”
Reading the sentence is not that annoying. However, I think something like this is may have better conversions or at least my readers would not be annoyed:
“Office stools made of the best quality leather in the market. They feature a swivel functionality. Furthermore, they are built for all purposes.”
All keywords were added to the sentence but they are scattered. And those are just two keyphrases and there are other variations to rank for for example:
“Swivel leather office stools”
“Leather swivel stools for office”
and so on
Putting together all keyphrases make the text annoying and unreadable. So I thought linking the target page using these keyphrases as anchor text from other internal pages of the site could be the answer. However, how close the keywords must be in order to get some relevance for all these keyphrases? Does internal linking can solve this issue?
Hi Daniel, this article on long tail keywords should give you some good tips on choosing and using them effectively
Placement of keywords on the post’s title pretty much plays a big role in optimizing the targeted keyword, given that it usually shows as the start of the anchor text when it’s used by others in linking to your post. It’s also important to search for other support keywords for your main targeted keyword to be used as variation when building links (ex. Fishing rod, best fishing rod, cheap fishing rod, custom fishing rod, etc…), since it makes your campaign look more natural, and also helps in boosting the main keyword’s rankings.
Well explained Rasmussen…and good point Daniel…
Nice Blog,Here are some important tips for SEO which may useful while doing SEO for any Site.