Do Keywords Really Matter On Google If Site is Spider Friendly?

Weight Of Keywords On Google.

[JoeHouse]

How important are keywords on Google or any engine anyways? If a site is well designed and very spider friendly does choosing your keywords wisely help? If you choose great keywords and you site is poor results will be weak right?

However if your site is full of relevant content and is spider ready, I don't think keywords will improve your position either way. Of course I am referring to keywords that are very competitive.

[martinibuster]

if your site is full of relevant content

What do you place in BOLD?

Ideally you place your keywords in bold, but it looks funny. Most websites place section headings in bold.

In Real Life, bolded content looks like this:
End-to-End Turnkey Solution

Not very meaningful or specific, is it? How many search engine users type that into a search engine? It works for the site visitor, but not for the search engine.

What SEO means to me is clarifying the message. Most web sites, au natural, present a far different message to search engines from what they mean to humans.

Yes, keywords matter, but also how you use the non-keywords, too.

[MHes]

Hi JoeHouse

I think you raise a very good point. Too many people target a few phrases and end up with contrived pages that do not 'sell' themselves well. They try and predict what people search for, when in reality search terms can be very varied and unpredictable.

If google is trying to avoid heavily seo'd pages, the best strategy is good content pages which the spider can read, and leave google to do its job and detect/rank you well accordingly.

Having said that, if emphasis can be put on obvious major keywords, without effecting the design too much, then that is sensible. Some sectors have limited variations... e.g. searches for 'Prince Charles' will be just that, while searches for "jobs" could manifest themselves in thousands of ways.

My mantra is now in keeping with your comments. Keep optimisation in moderation with only half an eye on major keywords, but let the content shine through and you will get good quality visitors that convert well.

[HitProf]

Hi all,

Am I the only one that thinks JoeHouse is referring to the meta keywords tag?

If so: the meta keywords tag doesn't add much to Google rankings (I'm still not convinced it does nothing at all as many other SEO's say) but they can still help in some smaller (local) engines.