The Relevancy of Keywords

Ask any SEO professional a few years ago what the most important factors were with regards to website optimization, and they’ll almost certainly mention keywords. However, the focus on keyword-based optimization has dropped out of favour enormously in the last few years, not least because major Google algorithm updates crushed many websites and low-quality content farms for their excessive on-site optimization.

The search engine crawlers are robots, and just like all robots used to be, they were once very simple in nature. SEO was much simpler too, in theory at least. In its early days, Google would rank online content solely based on the keywords and links that its crawlers would find on websites. Marketers and webmasters would target certain high-value keywords in an attempt to drag traffic in from the search engines whenever a user would search for the keywords in question.

Back to present day, the days of such keyword-based optimization and the inevitable keyword-stuffing that resulted from it are long behind us. In other words, the search engine robots were stupid, making it relatively easy for marketers to manipulate them. These practices later became collectively known as black-hat SEO, and while some such tactics do still work, they are less sustainable than ever before as the world of SEO continues to evolve at an alarming pace.

There is still a very important relationship between search engine visibility and keywords, but this relationship is far more complicated and sophisticated than it ever was before. Most marketers would agree that keyword placement still plays a role, but its diminished importance makes it preferable to focus on other areas of SEO in order to build a more sustainable, long-term strategy. However, paying attention to dated concepts such as keyword density will have little beneficial effects.

Google does still need to use textual content to understand what your website is about, and it ultimately uses keywords to provide this information. However, more important than stuffing your chosen keywords in bodies of text X number of times is putting your keywords in the right place. Keywords still have a place in meta tags and headers, but this is only because the search engine crawlers prioritize this content when breaking down webpages for analysis.