Internet Building Codes Blog

After a little break yesterday, let’s get right back into it.   Keyword proximity.  This one’s really straight forward.  Keep your keywords close to each other if they are related in the same phrase.  Let’s say you’re looking to optimize your page for the phrase “keyword proximity.”  It seems obvious that if your words are not close enough to each other, Google won’t see them in relation to each other and will not rank the page well for that phrase.

Here’s an example.  You write a paragraph about keyword proximity but you don’t want to sound too repetitive so you try and mix it up a little bit.  Great.  However, if you talk a lot about the “proximity of keywords” that’s great because “keyword proximity” and “the proximity of keywords” are relatively close to each other.  Google sees that and can put 2 and 2 together.

On the other hand, if you just mention the word “proximity” a few times and then later in the document talk about “keywords”, they’re not close enough to each other to cue Google into seeing the correlation, missing the theme of the page.

Even worse, if you change things up too much and only mention “keyword proximity” once and then use the phrase “keyword location” the next time and then say that “you need to make sure that your keywords are close to each other” the last time, only a human is smart enough to see the common theme.  Google’s computers won’t catch your drift and they’ll just see a page that mentions each of those phrases once, not really placing emphasis on any one of them.  Repeat the phrase several times, place importance on the same phrase by putting it in your headline and title and Google starts to think, “Now this page is about keyword proximity.”

Chadd Bryant

Some people are superstitious and would skip over Part 13.  I’m not.  I do however, enjoy watching “The Office” on NBC.   Michael Scott when asked if he was superstitious, replied “…no, I don’t consider myself superstitious… just a little stitious, maybe…”

So for those of you who are even a little stitious, we’ll just leave Part 13 at that so your not always afraid of “keyword proximity.”  We’ll cover that one tomorrow.

My apologies to those of you who would have been unaffected by the number 13.

Chadd Bryant

I see it all the time.  People come up with a long list of keywords and they use that keyword string in the title and meta keywords.  And then they copy that page again and again as they open it and change the content to create another page.  Sounds like it would work fine, but when you have a long list of 100 phrases on the page, your keyword density becomes so dulted that the site has little relevance for any of the terms.

You’re actually going to find that your results are much better if you take those phrases and focus on one phrase per page.  Just choose on of the phrases and use it in the title, the headline, the content on the page, the meta keywords, ALT tags, comments etc.  Then choose another phrase and focus on that one on another page.  Then when someone is searching for your phrase, Google is more likely to see your page that’s dedicated to that phrase as more relevant that the other guy who just mentioned the phrase once.

Here’s the other benefit.  If you use a long list of words that are not actually mentioned in the page itself, then Google may think you’re trying to cheat or manipulate their search results.  You know what that means?  You could be delisted.  So be sure that the words that you list in your meta tags, are also found in the content of that page.

Until tomorrow…

Chadd Bryant