Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
While I know this is a squishy question....
As a poll...
1. What do you think the Density and Prominence of a keyword on Google is these days?
2. How does that differ from other SE?
Thanks in advance.
ARC
Prominence may be a factor - especially in certain elements, such as the Title. However, I see so many counter examples that I also doubt that Google is using prominence in any significant way.
Both of these metrics are outmoded technology when it comes to IR. They can have value when searching over a document collection that is non-adversarial, such as, possibly, an organization's internal knowledge base. But the webmaster/Google relationship has a high adversarial component. I've called it a competitive/cooperative game in the past, and I think that term I borrowed from games theory is very accurate.
I, like everyone here, have been feverishly trying to find the commonality between the SERP results on page 1 versus page 2....
The -950 seem so far seems to be among other things incoming links and keyword page balance.... but when analyzing the first 2 pages... things get a little tighter and so I thought that there might be a KW/Semantics/Density/Prominence isssue here.
You have confirmed that indeed there could be some limited exposure to KW's - however not like a few years ago.
It would be interesting now to see what others seem to find.
Thank you!
ARC
<title> Is real, real important. Always will be, because Google is very good at deciding whether
a) The site is really "about" a particular few things, or too diffuse;
b) Whether the page clearly states what it's about, and the content really does follow suit, or too what extent it doesn't.
And you'll always get a lot of mileage from key phrase placement following Jakob Nielsen's [useit.com] reading pattern study results, in your content design because Google expects the page to be as user friendly as possible, e.g. ease of navigation and ease of access to relevant content.
Word stemming [209.85.165.104] is important. Gbot expects to see related terms, and if you're trying to tweak your keyword weight, it's good to have the top-level pages in your site containing them, often.
If your site is about goods or services that are described (e.g. Wkipedia) by a non-competitor, it's good to link keywords to "artcles" about your product.
It's good if your inbound link's' respective anchor text employs word stemming, e.g. if your content is about "blue phone widgets" then it's be to have inbound anchor text on other sites, phrased like "telephones that use blue widgets" and variations thereof, etc.
<description> is important, but only to the extent there's a very good chance if Gbot determines your site does in fact match the description tag's content, it will use those words in the snippet.
Additionally, Google has also begun experimenting with using meta tags that are geared around parsing web pages with text-only crawlers that will integrate with some meta tags commonly used by giant databases at large universities for their workgroups. In fact we've experimented with them and seen good results; they seem to be germane for websites with lots of URLs or with lots of items/products to index.
It's very likely this will become part of their search scope, so in the interests of being very forward looking, use a Lynx browser emulator like Delorie to view your important/most relevant pages, see how they read for text-only browsers.
HTH
.
1. What do you think the Density and Prominence of a keyword on Google is these days?
As natural as possible with natural variations in the text. I doubt keyword density from the aspect you are thinking of plays nearly as much of a part in ranking.
[edited by: CainIV at 3:53 am (utc) on Aug. 12, 2007]
