What Effect Do Your Keywords Have in the Search Results?
There are many factors that go into determining where your pages rank in the Google search results, at last count more than 200 and climbing. And this is only a guess, using the available empirical evidence SEO’s and webmasters have been able to divine from looking intently behind the curtain.
While SEO is at least in part a crap shoot, we can make very educated determinations regarding what we ought to do and ought not to do to our pages to try and get them found highly in Googles search results.
In a search world not so long ago and far away, you could get top rankings simply by stuffing as many of your primary keywords into your content as you could reasonable fit. Not any longer. These days Google’s search algorithm has become smarter, and is able to discern a great deal more intent, and recognizes keyword stuffing instantly.
This is not to suggest you can’t do well by strategically inserting keywords in all the right places. Indeed, you should do this. You just have to do it naturally.
How to use keywords to increase your search rankings
Shaping your page content to focus on a particular keyword ranking is something of an art. Often the domain name may have little to nothing related to the keyword in question, and that’s one reason keywords in domain names are no longer the signal they used to be.
Today having the keyword in your URL, title tag, H1-5 headings and sprinkled judiciously throughout the content is the best way you can help your cause.
What keyword tactics can hurt you
There are some ways you can shoot yourself in the foot in this respect as well. Keyword stuffing, that aforementioned relic of yesteryear, is but one.
Another frequent mistake is that when acquiring backlinks, webmasters often tend to go hog wild making their anchor text is all the same keyword. Nothing screams unnatural to Google more than a link profile employing only the most prized keywords. Mix it up with a variety of keywords, and some non-keyword phrases like “click here”, and others.