SEO – Keywords Part 14
After a little break yesterday, let’s get right back into it. Keyword proximity. This one’s really straight forward. Keep your keywords close to each other if they are related in the same phrase. Let’s say you’re looking to optimize your page for the phrase “keyword proximity.” It seems obvious that if your words are not close enough to each other, Google won’t see them in relation to each other and will not rank the page well for that phrase.
Here’s an example. You write a paragraph about keyword proximity but you don’t want to sound too repetitive so you try and mix it up a little bit. Great. However, if you talk a lot about the “proximity of keywords” that’s great because “keyword proximity” and “the proximity of keywords” are relatively close to each other. Google sees that and can put 2 and 2 together.
On the other hand, if you just mention the word “proximity” a few times and then later in the document talk about “keywords”, they’re not close enough to each other to cue Google into seeing the correlation, missing the theme of the page.
Even worse, if you change things up too much and only mention “keyword proximity” once and then use the phrase “keyword location” the next time and then say that “you need to make sure that your keywords are close to each other” the last time, only a human is smart enough to see the common theme. Google’s computers won’t catch your drift and they’ll just see a page that mentions each of those phrases once, not really placing emphasis on any one of them. Repeat the phrase several times, place importance on the same phrase by putting it in your headline and title and Google starts to think, “Now this page is about keyword proximity.”
Chadd Bryant
