There’s no denying it: having the right content is an essential part of a successful search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. Text is food for search engines and it’s how they determine a web page’s relevance to a keyword query. Pages that have content that flaunts keywords stand a better chance of ranking than passive ones that barely mention the webmaster’s target search terms. This has created a dilemma for content authors for more than a decade now: what’s the higher priority – readability or keyword usage?
There are two camps in this great debate. Writers will always say that a mandate to use keywords aggressively for SEO kills creativity and results in robotic, flat content that human readers hate. SEO mavens will always cling to the argument that creative content is useless if it doesn’t rank and is never found by readers in the first place.
Both sides should give it a rest.
To me, there really is no debate. Keyword usage and good content can go hand in hand to produce great SEO results. The main thing that authors have to understand here is that as long as you’re focused on your topic and you know what you’re writing about, keywords should appear naturally in your sentences and paragraphs.
The most important thing you have to constantly think about is this little thing called VALUE. This is what makes your content attractive to readers and if content becomes popular, search engines will find and rank it no matter what.
Readers First
Because it could take a while for some content to be indexed by the search engines, it only makes sense to prioritize the creation of content that by itself immediately generates traffic. And the key to creating content that gets visited by a good number of people almost instantly is to create content that is extremely relevant, valuable and interesting.
Humor and news sites, for example, don’t rely heavily on SEO, but a lot of them get ranked well for various keywords on a regular basis. This is because news and humor is innately shareable and people on the web are bound to post links to them in blogs, forums and social media. All these links going around will send signals to search engines that a piece of content is popular, therefore it should be ranked high.
But keep in mind that value is relative. A highly valuable content is one that addresses exactly the reader’s concern and feeds his interests.
That’s why before setting out to create content, ask yourself, “If I were the reader, how do I find this content relevant and useful? How does this address my concerns?”
Search engines next
And now the part where we satisfy the search engines. Conventional knowledge will suggest that the more you mention your keywords, the more search engines favour you. In part, this is true. You really do need to mention your target search terms in crucial areas like the title tag, the article title, preferably the first paragraph. The rest of the way can be written as you please. It’s probably better to mention the main keyword or phrase three or more times in a 400-word article and more often than not, it happens without a conscious effort from a decent writer.
Lemme guess; keyword density, right?
A lot of people still swear by the notion that the ideal keyword density for web content is 2-3%. That is, for every 100 words written, there should be at least three mentions of a target keyword.
I just don’t bother with it.
Keyword density is an outdated concept that’s hardly relevant these days especially with how sophisticated search engines have become. Instead of measuring keyword density, search engines like Google now use this thing called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to determine how relevant a piece of content is to a keyword.
Going by the Wikipedia definition, LSI is an indexing and retrieval method that uses a mathematical technique called Singular value decomposition (SVD) to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text. LSI is based on the principle that words that are used in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings. A key feature of LSI is its ability to extract the conceptual content of a body of text by establishing associations between those terms that occur in similar contexts
I’ll talk to you soon.
Did you get all that? If you didn’t, let me break it down this way, cuz: Google understands synonyms and pronouns that refer to your keyword, so you don’t have to repeat it incessantly like a broken record.
Bottom line? Keep in mind that keywords are important and use them accordingly, but don’t write for the sake of using them.
Search engines were made to understand natural writing patterns. Writing patterns don’t have to be adjusted because search engines have no intention of pressuring us to change the way we express ourselves.
More value + tasteful and natural keyword usage = winning content.
Later,
Andy
