SEO Beyond Keywords

In the world of search engine optimization, we all know that keywords and keyword phrases play an important role. They are considered to rank you webpages higher on search engines when a particular keyword or phrase is searched. It is no surprise that keyword research pretty much dominates the SEO industry. It requires less or no money and efforts except for incorporating the keywords into web content. But despite popular believe, SEO nowadays is more than just keywords. If you want to get the maximum results from search engine optimization, you need to consider other techniques as well than just keywords.

Apparently, search engines now are becoming extremely intelligent in terms of finding relevant information and content from the web. No longer are they relying on old ways, but have adapted their spiders and crawlers to get users the most relevant information available on the internet. Using complex algorithms and methods like LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), search engines now focus on the relevancy and ranking of the page instead of the keywords typed by the user. The best thing about these modern algorithms is that they scan the content of a web page as a whole, rather than looking for specific keywords that have been used strategically to manipulate the search results.

With these algorithms, search engines now do not look for exact match of your keyword phrase to locate relevant pages. This, however, does not mean that keywords are worthless and should not be used in the Meta tags, title, description, link text, headings, and in the body of the content. On the other hand, this means that now SEO experts have to go beyond the standard keyword optimization approach to get higher search engine rankings.

What this implies is that in addition to using keywords, you have to focus on other aspects of your web page as well. Search engines nowadays determine the relevancy of your webpage by considering various aspect of a webpage such as the keywords you use, semantically close words, related phrases and structures, and the relationship between words in the content of your website. The overall structure of your site matters a lot too, and employing the right elements will surely help you get higher rankings.

The key lies in using the right combination of all words in your content and having proper elements. This means that you need to have relevant and related content for a particular keyword or keypharse. Additionally, you need to add the right number of links from trusted websites. Elements such as Flash and JavaScript may look good on a website, but these are not search engine friendly and so should be avoided as much as possible. Be sure to add a page summary hidden in the description tag that will help you get the desired results. Instead of repeating keywords or phrases in the entire content, focus should be paid to the opening and closing paras of content, title and headings. If your webpage has a lot of images, then label those images with keywords. Finally, you can use social media as well to see what your target customers are looking for on the internet and prepare your content accordingly.

The recent developments in the field of search engine optimization have backfired many blackhat SEO techniques and keyword stuffing tools that have been extensively used in the past. Now, if you really want to rank higher on search engines, you really need to re-evaluate your SEO content strategy and employ techniques that go beyond simple keyword optimization.