When optimising your site for search engine placement, it’s important to look at various factors. Keywords are really important in SEO. They help you get found for your niche and you should definitely optimise for more than one word and phrase both on your site as well as off your site.
It’s not just what keywords you use that’s important though. Keyword proximity can also help you in your efforts to dominate the search engine results pages for your niche. Keyword proximity is a measurement of the distance between keywords and if your keywords are close to one another, this can be very helpful to you.
Search engines look at a lot of different things when they evaluate your site such as:
- Titles
- Tags
- Meta description
- Image names
- Incoming links (number and where they come from)
- Outgoing links (where they go to)
- Keywords in your text
- Keyword placement in your text
Here are some tips for good keyword proximity practises:
- In the title (if you can fit two relevant phrases in while making them sound natural, even better!)
- Laterally related words throughout the text, in headings, close to main keyword phrases, etc.
- Not just using a targeted phrase as is but also splitting it in some instances or reversing it as well.
Tip:
Some copywriters end a sentence with a keyword phrase and then start the very next sentence with the same phrase in the first paragraph.
It’s important that your text doesn’t look keyword stuffed. You can use a keyword density calculation tool to help you as well to ensure your instances of single words and of phrases isn’t too high. Too much stuffing will result in turning off readers (due to poor text quality) and turning off search engines who will consider your site to be spam.
Quality is more important than anything in your site content but you can weave relevant keywords in to “key” places and increase your chances of getting organic search engine traffic!
Have a most outstanding day.
Sean RasmussenAussie Internet Marketing
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008 - 2012
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I didn’t realise that proximity was a factor. I look into that.
A great tool for figuring out keyword tool density is by putting your content in a MS Word document. It has a word count feature as well as being able to count a certain word or phrase. It’s then just a simple math equation. Best of all you probably have it already.
Great idea Gee, I am all for innovative suggestions and I have kept a note of this.
Hi Sean,
This is great advice. I do spend a lot of time doing keyword research. But, I’m only now starting to use laterally related words and to change the order of my keywords in the page copy. There’s still so much to learn.
Again some very helpful tips. Thanks Jazz & Gee. Your comsments help me learn too so keep em coming guys..
Cheers
Rose
Thanks Sean
I always welcome information on keywords and this article has some really great ideas for keyword proximity, something else to add to my toolkit for SEO.