Intelligence Trumps Keywords – Another Reason Not to Stuff

Jessica Brugman
January  08, 2010

Businesses have long written web content to include the right keywords ensuring customers can find their site through search engines. This tactic is great for search engine optimization (SEO), but it’s not the only tactic. In order to truly optimize, you need to incorporate several tactics, including:

• Important terms should be contained in headers, sub headers, bold text, italicized text, and at the beginning and at the end of the page.
• Links within your site and elsewhere should contain keyword-rich anchor text.
• Regularly update web content on your site.
• Acquire links pointing to your site from other web locations.
• Most web pages should have somewhere between 250-500 words of content.
• Page headers should contain business name and descriptive keywords.
• Focus each of your web pages on an intelligent concept…the most important online marketing tool.

Understanding Google Semantics
Let’s say your website is about landscaping. Instead of writing your home page to include 16 occurrences of the phrase “Illinois lawn aeration” (this is called keyword stuffing), you could write about lawn aeration in an intelligent way using relevant synonyms and adjectives to describe your landscaping service in total.
 
The reason you do this is because Google, the largest of the search engines, has a semantic search capability. Semantic search means the engine is able to identify words related to one another, not just the keyword phrase itself. 

Google understands concepts.
Internet users who search “Illinois lawn aeration” might find your site through search engine result pages (SERPs), but they might also find your site if they search “Illinois lawn care” or “yard aeration,” for example. Google has the intelligence to see the connection between all of these phrases, because they are in the same conceptual family.

Semantic search is important because it means keyword stuffers don’t always earn the top space in the SERPs. Instead, those businesses who write intelligent content that describes the purpose of the site clearly will be rewarded.

Other Reasons Not to Stuff Keywords
Most marketers advise against keyword stuffing not just because of Google’s semantics capabilities, but because it doesn’t help the reader. When the focus of the content is simply on the keyword, sentences lose meaning, text becomes difficult to read, and put simply, the website looks like spam. In other words, what’s the point in a great organic search result position if visitors leave because of the poorly written content?
For more SEO tips and tricks, visit our SEO link.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/161869/google_rolls_out_semantic_search
_capabilities.html

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/two-new-improvements-to-google-results.html