Often when carrying out your online marketing and SEO - tasks you’ll come across terms (e.g. Keyword Prominence) which unless you’ve encountered them before you’re not likely to immediately know what they mean. This article explains the common keyword terms which tend to come up when search engine optimising your web page along with suggestions on how to use them to improve the ranking of your website.
What is a ‘Keyword?’
A keyword is a word or phrase which best describes the concepts of a topic. When looking for information online using search engines, a person will type a word or phrase relevant to the topic they wish to find information on. When picking keywords you want to find the main words relevant to your topic and the synonyms for these words. Say for example a person from Salisbury searched for an SEO company in their local area, they’d type “Search engine optimisation, Salisbury” in their search engine. This means that a good keyword phrase for a local SEO company would be “SEO, Search engine optimisation, Salisbury” so their website will appear in the results for that search.
Keyword Frequency
Keyword frequency refers to how often a particular keyword appears within a website. The more frequently a keyword (or phrase) appears on a website page, the more relevance that website page is given for that keyword when it is searched in a search engine. It’s a good idea to pick the keyword or phrase which is most relevant to the page and repeat it as often as possible within the content. It is important not to use the keywords too much, preventing the copy from being readable or making the search engines think that you are trying to fool them.
Keyword Proximity
Keyword Proximity is the term used for indentifying the proximity (distance) between two or more keywords. In an ideal world your keywords would be as close together as possible without affecting readability. The closer together your keywords are; the better.
For example:
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With the given example, when searching the term “search engine rankings,” a web page containing the first example sentence is likely to rank higher than the second sentence. The reason for this is because the words are placed closer together.
Keyword Prominence
Keyword prominence is quite self explanatory as it refers to how prominent keywords are within a webpage. Usually to improve keyword prominence you’ll put your keywords inside the Title, Keyword and Description tag, as well as at the start of a sentence and in the first part of your body content (it’s often suggested, that keywords should appear within the first and last 50 words on the webpage.)
Keyword Density
Keyword density is a ratio (percentage) determined by how many keywords appear in all indexed text from your webpage. Though you can’t really determine the preferable ratio for the keyword density as all search engines have different requirements. It is recommended to stay between a 2-8% ratio range.
Correct keyword usage is vital when optimising your site for search engines as search engines use your website content to determine what your website content relates to. To be identified by your chosen keywords you should be sure to have clean accurate coding in your webpage, and that your keyword frequency, proximity, prominence and density are balanced.
At Webbed Feet UK Ltd, Salisbury, we offer our own search engine optimisation service designed for all business types and sizes. We’re able to increase your search engine ranking whether you’re a new website or an already well established one.
Check back in a week to read our next SEO article….