Moving from keyword density to keyword relevancy
1. Content: Long Live the King
In 2015, content is still King, and the quality of that content is significant to how supremely that King reigns. In short, your website is only as good as the information it provides, so it’s important that your content is relevant, well-written, engaging, topically fresh and updated frequently enough to draw new eyes while keeping your current readers coming back for more. Producing quality content on a regular basis will go a long way to generating organic traffic and establishing your website as an authority source.
2. Conversational Queries
With the continuing rise of mobile and the increasing number of voice searches, conversational queries such as, “How do I make……?” or, “What’s the best way to…..?” or, “Where do I find…..?” are becoming an increasingly significant feature of SEO. Instead of identifying specific keywords and singling them out among any given query, Google’s Hummingbird update identifies those same keywords within the context of the content to determine overall relevancy of the content against a user search. Adapting your keyword strategy to better mesh with mobile-friendly conversational queries is a solid step to providing Google with more relevant content.
3. LSI Keywords
Latent Semantic Indexing is a feature of Google’s algorithm that identifies the relationships within your content in order to establish a better contextual overview of the web page. With Latent Semantic Indexing, Google is indexing web pages based on the frequency and variety of keywords and keyphrases rather than on the frequency of a single keyword or keyphrase. LSI keywords include plurals, acronyms, spelling variants, synonyms, and related words and terminology. By using semantic keywords in your content, you’re helping Google determine content relevancy.
4. Schema Markup
Schema markup is a type of structured microdata that defines specific elements of your content so search engines more readily recognize not only the data itself, but how the data relates to other content on the page. Schema markup also appears in SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) as rich snippets. If you include schema markup microdata in your code, it will help search and increase your visibility in SERPs. Check out the Schema Markup website for more information.
5. SEO & Content Marketing
It’s true that SEO is primarily concerned with the technical aspects of keyword and keyphrase research, competitive analysis, and where and how those keywords and keyphrases appear on your website. But, as mentioned above, SEO is also about content. SEO & Content Marketing are actually symbiotic, often-overlapping, entities. If SEO is the venue, Content Marketing is the musical entertainment that draws the audience. The technical elements of SEO – XML sitemaps, optimized robots.txt files, alt image tags, title tags, meta descriptions – all act as road signs directing search engine crawlers in the right direction towards the stage where your content is putting on the show.
Kiosk’s Search Marketing team offers SEO reviews, consultations and more. To speak to one of our SEO experts, please contact us.