Keywords - Outdated or Still Critical?

[goodroi]

The last couple of weeks there has been some debate over keywords. Are the still critical to your SEO success or are they deprecated? From my perspective, it depends.

Too many people are using out dated thinking when it comes to keywords. They think that you need to mention the specific keyword that searchers are typing into Google a certain amount to perform well. This thinking is too close to the outdated keyword density metric that is no longer a direct factor on rankings but was important about 15-20 years ago (yikes, I've been doing this too long). I am not saying you should create content that never uses the keyword the searcher type in. Rather you should supplement the keyword with relevant synonyms and concepts as you provide a more comprehensive answer with significant value. One test I like to use when evaluating new content writers is to delete the specific keyword, then read their sample article. If I can still understand the article then the writer has done a good job of explaining the article's idea without overusing a keyword. Users & search engines don't like keyword stuffing.

If your content can be summarized into a single sentence, you do not have sustainable content. Sooner than later Google will figure out that single sentence answer and display it in the serps likely making your content irrelevant. This is why you want to focus on substantial content that has real value, but I am going on a tangent and should bring this back to keywords.

So when are keywords still critical? Keyword data lets you identify concepts & ideas to better direct your content creation. That is super important. Thoughtfully placing keywords can also help improve your usability. Properly placed keywords enhance the scent of information for users. Google isn't ignoring h tags or title tags, so some shrewd keyword handling can be beneficial.

How are you using or no longer using keywords in your SEO efforts?

[graeme_p]

You are going to tell me you have a way to identify usability and "prettiness" of the site via a robot?

He may not, but Google does.

Its really quite simple in principle. Quality raters rate sites. A statistical analysis is run on this to identify which combinations of numbers the numbers used in Google algo are associated with quality sites. This is NOT as simple as a high x is good and a high y is bad - it may be that a high x is good if y is low, but not if y is high.

There are problems - the quality raters are quite a narrow group, so all sites all over the world for all audiences are being assessed how well the appeal to twenty something (all American?) graduates willing to do a boring job at high pressure for a low hourly rate.

[graeme_p]

Because what you are describing is machine learning of KNOWN cases. You can't possibly stick it on every situation. Impossible with all the "machine learning", it is mathematically a subset.

You infer a model from the subset - it is how statistics are used in everything from marketing to science. You will get errors, but you should usually be right.

[NickMNS]

@smilie does your competitor target these keywords directly, that is does he have a page dedicated to "green widgets", another for "blue widgets", another for "commercial green widgets" yet another for "commercial blue widgets"?

@tangor

AI of any kind is not ready for prime time, and might be more than a few years just to get the thing to work.

The fact that you make such a statement is in itself proof that AI is ready for prime-time. It shows that you do not even realize all the countless interaction you have everyday with AI.

[martinibuster]

It shows that you do not even realize all the countless interaction you have everyday with AI.

True.

Believe it or not, humans are not ranking websites behind the scenes and artificial intelligence and machine learning is real. Machines can and do understand concepts enough to not require keyword phrases to be on a web page, much less in an H1/Title tag. The H1, title tag keyword thing lost some ground circa 2012.

If you are practicing Internet Marketing in 2017 and you still believe that keyword tags in the H1 and/or Title Tag are critical for ranking, no offense meant, but you may need to consider the possibility,just entertain the idea, that it's possible that things have changed in the past ten years. Because it's true, search engines have progressed in the past ten years.

[hannamyluv]

I think that from a ranking perspective, individual keywords are certainly defunct. But the concept of keywords still has value. When we assign articles to writers, we still give them keywords. But in our case, we never (in 10 years) focused on just one keyword per article. We focused on what could be called "key themes". The writer is asked to use the keywords in the key theme in the title and the H tags and the content. No certain number of times. Just as they see they can fit it. I think that it has some bearing on ranking (though not nearly as much as it use to), but we actually do it for marketing and usability reasons as well.

Those keywords still get bolded in the search results, which attracts the scanning eye and increases your chances of getting clicked on. People still prefer to click on or see the words they were searching for when they get to a page. It reassures them that they found the information that they are looking for. No changes in an algorithm will change that.

And that marketing and usability though does also have bearing on SEO too. So, IMHO, the whole keyword thing is not nearly as cut and dried as yes they help or no they don't.

[Shaddows]

@hannamyluv
That is an excellent piece of commentary. Key themes for producing content, backed up by keywords for marketing, usability and just because they are naturally part of the content so produced.

It's a contemporary concept that has more to do with end users than shove-it-down-the-throat "SEO"

[toidi]

Machines can and do understand concepts enough to not require keyword phrases to be on a web page

i used to believe this and my content changed likewise. I removed the obvious synonyms from my content thinking that google knows a house is the same thing as a home and i would show up for both terms when only using one. now i don't rank for those synonyms anymore. Even worse is those synonyms show up in the suggested searches and there are different results for each term. Now i have to go back and add those synonyms back into my content.

If ai understands concepts then i should noy have to include either of these terms and still be able to rank for them given the amount of content on the subject, the amount of time on the web and the authority. My home page has been on the first page of google since google first started and still is.

AI might be real but it still a child when it comes to knowledge learned.

[martinibuster]

If ai understands concepts then i should noy have to include either of these terms...

You're right of course, 100%. I agree with you completely. I've seen similar.

There is a limitation to the effectiveness of Google's algorithm. That limitation is the amount of available data used to train the algorithm. The algorithm is only as good as the amount of data used to train it. It does not work so well on phrases that lack enough data.

These phrases are sometimes called longtail but they're more accurately described as not common searches. I frequently use uncommon search queries and Google does indeed default to a more keyword based SERP in those situations.

In my opinion this is an artifact of Google's change away from delivering relevance to a search query to providing SERPs that satisfy the most people. In my opinion it breaks down when there aren't enough people making the same search query in order to draw conclusions about that query.

For example, a few minutes ago I was seeking information about writing my own WordPress shortcodes and Google kept returning page after page of shortcode plugins. Why? Because Google is not a keyword relevant search engine. Google is a user relevant search engine.

Thus, because most people are satisfied with a plugin when they use the word "shortcode" Google is only showing me pages about plugins.

[toidi]

It does not work so well on phrases that lack enough data. 

if they don't have enough data about how people search for homes then they do not have enough data about anything and the whole ai, rank brain, machine learning concept is still in its infancy and not functional. I would venture to say the every person involed with developing ai lives in one. My niche is one of the most competitive as proven by the millions being spent on tv commercials, radio commercials, print adverising and big box sites, so the machines have more than enough data, they just don't know how to use it.

i apologize for using an actual keyword and the mods should change it if deemed necessary but it seemed to be the only way to prove my point.

[martinibuster]

I did a search for: suffolk va two bedroom house for sale

The fifth result had the word homes all over it and only a single instance of house.

The sixth result didn't have the word House in it at all.

That kind of proves my point that the keyword on the page doesn't matter, in the niche that you suggested. I'm getting a deja vu moment here. In 2015 Fathom challenged me with a keyword phrase and his keyword phrase also proved my point.

I got similar results with: suffolk va two bedroom house for sale. The number one result did not have the word "house" in it at all.

Longtail Phrase - Google Falters

I did a search for: suffolk va two bedroom house with two bedrooms and one bath for sale
Now Google returns more pages with the word "house" in it. Additionally, Google ignored the "for sale" part and started showing me rental properties. This is just as I described.

Suffolk, VA is a relatively small town of 80k+ people. So that makes it ideal for testing out the borders of what Google is capable of.

[NickMNS]

@martinibuster Can you please stop using the term "Longtail" when describing long sentences. Yes often longer sentences fall into the category a longtail term but it is because of the length on the search term. Longtail refers to the frequency with which the term is searched for. More specifically when a term has very low search volume it will then appear at the very far right end of the distribution of the frequency of searches. This region of the distribution is referred to as the tail, or long tail if there are many values with a low frequency. A term such as "asdfbg" is as much a "longtail" term as "I would like to buy a blue widget made with special pink gadgets from the city of Kalamazoo". [en.wikipedia.org...]

Now to the topic. I would like to remind people that Google provides a ranking of results, not a set of matched results. For common search terms for which there exists many pages that match the term this distinction is not important or noticeable. But when one takes a term for which there are few, or no "matching" results Google will return as many results as possible ranked by the degree to which they match the search term. So it is normal that a term that is very specific such as "suffolk va two bedroom house with two bedrooms and one bath for sale" would return imperfect matches (rentals) as perfect matches are few. The point of interest is how Google interprets the searchers intent to determine what is or isn't a reasonable matching, it would seem that Google may have weighted having a bathroom as more important that wanting to buy vs rent. All this to say , in every example, "keywords" in the strict sense (actual word appearing on the site) seems to count for little.

[martinibuster]

Can you please stop using the term "Longtail" when describing long sentences.

I truly appreciate your being a stickler for the proper usage of terms. I share your concern. However, I am using Longtail to refer to infrequently searched for content. Thus, if you scroll up you can see how I qualified my statements with this:

These phrases are sometimes called longtail but they're more accurately described as not common searches...

;)

[tangor]

The fact that you make such a statement is in itself proof that AI is ready for prime-time. It shows that you do not even realize all the countless interaction you have everyday with AI.

While this is a fun read, and all the side tracks, mine included (and a bit late as I don't visit WW all that often any longer) AI is in the "news".

‘Artificial Intelligence’ was 2016's fake news
[theregister.co.uk...]

As with the most cynical (or deranged) internet hypesters, the current “AI” hype has a grain of truth underpinning it. Today neural nets can process more data, faster. Researchers no longer habitually tweak their models. Speech recognition is a good example: it has been quietly improving for three decades. But the gains nowhere match the hype: they’re specialised and very limited in use. So not entirely useless, just vastly overhyped. As such, it more closely resembles “IoT”, where boring things happen quietly for years, rather than “Digital Transformation”, which means nothing at all.

I'm not the only one watching from the side lines to see how all this deep data, AI, and machine learning is going to turn out.

That said, keywords still have value (words are required for any of this to work at all), but no longer have "magic powers" where cleverness or misuse can rocket one to the top. The OP was, and remains "Keywords - Outdated or Still Critical?"

I'm in the camp where words are (and context, too) are critical but keywords still have value, but no magical powers.

[EditorialGuy]

How are you using or no longer using keywords in your SEO efforts?

I've always tried to use descriptive text in titles and main headlines.

Back in the olden days, we were told that it was important to provide search engines with easily digestible "spider food," especially in page titles and main headlines. That's still good advice, I think. If I write a page about doughnuts, I'll probably include the word "Doughnuts" in the page title and between the H1 tags, as opposed to something like "Li'l orbits of dough" or "The Circles of Life: Squidless Calimari for Breakfast." I'm not sure I'd call that an "SEO effort," though. It's just part of my editorial instincts.

[frankleeceo]

@EditorialGuy

Thank you, your funny comments made my day. LoL at "The Circles of Life: Squidless Calimari for Breakfast." I will relate to that whenever I have my daily doughnuts for a while haha.

[Yugang_Xu]

If you do not consider SEO, normal editing about the content will also meet the needs of SEO, such as the inevitable product in the introduction of this keyword will appear several times the product name; so a keyword research, just make sure the content on the website construction of the subject, there is no need to deliberately consider SEO skills.

I am a Chinese, with the translation software, if the description is not clear, please understand

[keyplyr]

Hi Yugang_Xu and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

[lucy24]

geo-house and geo-home so they haven't quite figured out the meaning of some very basic words yet or that some words mean the same thing

thinking that google knows a house is the same thing as a home

I say: good for Google, for knowing that a house and a home are not even remotely the same thing, unless you are specifically in the business of selling real estate. And that takes us way beyond word1===word2.

Here is an old keyword stuffing test that I can share [google.com...]

Actually that makes me think of how google behaves when confronted with a word it doesn't know--especially in the context of a language it doesn't know. You could change one letter, or add a bit, and google would no longer recognize that you're searching for the same thing. Doesn't have to be a 54-letter word, either. Back when gwt/gsc listed Keywords, they credited me with at least four forms of "and".

[EditorialGuy]

I say: good for Google, for knowing that a house and a home are not even remotely the same thing, unless you are specifically in the business of selling real estate.

"Home" is a synonym for "house" in some circles (among people with pretensions, for example).

I wonder if Google knows that "necessary" is a synonym for "toilet" in some parts of the Southern United States?

[lucy24]

I wonder if Google knows that "necessary" is a synonym for "toilet"

When you search for "lavatory", will their results be based on geolocation?

I think "necessary" is also used in parts of Ireland. I've seen it in print. But yeah, it helps to know if your user is concerned with a specific noun, or an adjective that in most circumstances would be treated as meaningless filler.

[Wilburforce]

I wonder if Google knows that "necessary" is a synonym for "toilet"

A pedant might argue that "necessary" is a euphemism for "toilet" (which, ironically, is unnecessary, given that "toilet" is itself a different euphemism for the same thing). However, there is so much general and local variation in the use of English that there will inevitably be examples of both inclusion and non-inclusion of special word-substitutions in Google's database.

There are many examples (see e.g. a cappella) which show that words like "a" are no longer ignored in all contexts, and even relatively complex misspellings are usually picked up ("did you mean...?"). I am confident that Google's assimilation of local and uncommon substitutions is growing, and whether it has reached "necessary" for "toilet" is a question of extent, not of direction.

However, language is evolving too, so it is impossible that what Google "knows" can ever be completely in-step.

What a word "means" in the context of keywords is very pertinent to this debate. The "AI" component of Google Search will derive from probability-based machine-learning, and if many people search for "house" when they mean "home" then it becomes more probable that the word "house" does not exactly match the user's desired outcome. One result of this will be that more results for "house" include the word "home" but do not include the word "house". A more general consequence is that exact-term matching is less relevant in results: SEO cannot live by keywords alone.

My personal view is that inexact searchers comprise the majority, and they are Google's target market, or as Piet Hein put it:

"Why do bad writers win the fight?
Why do good writers die in need?
Because the writers who can't write
Are read by readers who can't read."

Inverted commas still force exact-matches, and if you only want traffic from searchers who know and apply that, keywords are probably all you need.

[aristotle]

"Why do bad writers win the fight?
Why do good writers die in need?
Because the writers who can't write
Are read by readers who can't read."

"Why do bad websites win the fight?
Why do good websites die in need?
Because the websites that are bad
Are read by readers who are dumb."

which is the majority

[martinibuster]

My personal view is that inexact searchers comprise the majority, and they are Google's target market...

Yes, yes and more. Google and Microsoft have already researched the phenomenon of vague search queries by mining their click data, seeing patterns specific to individual queries and identifying which sites satisfied those queries. That's a problem solved about a decade ago.

The more part that you allude to is what I previously stated in this discussion:

In my opinion this is an artifact of Google's change away from delivering relevance to a search query to providing SERPs that satisfy the most people.