When you are creating on-page content, it is useful to target two things, keywords and topic search relevance. During the keyword targeting era, you had various pages that were optimized for one particular keyword or keyword phrase, and due to these similarities, there just wasn’t enough content diversity on websites. Later, it was announced that Google will start to prioritize relevance, so people shifted their focus to creating useful content.
Old school page optimization was quite simple. You’d see just how much a niche-related word is “powerful” and just how difficult it would be to rank for that particular word. Once you form a keyword phrase pool with an adequate power-difficulty ratio, you’d start creating pages that target those keywords.
Google introduced updates to put an end to this type of page optimization, so people thought that keywords were no longer important, and started to solely focus on creating content that will answer the search queries more accurately.
However, that didn’t turn out as expected either. Sure, you can create an incredibly useful piece of content, but without the right keyword targeting, it still wouldn’t rank well. The solution lies in this somewhat hybrid model that focuses on both utilizing adequate keywords and creating relevant and insightful content.
The following article will briefly explain how you should tackle this issue. It’s worth saying that these tips won’t help you immediately boost your pagerank, but they will certainly give you an edge over your competitors.
Choosing Keywords
When choosing keywords, experts usually use a certain tool that measures their online potency. In one month, one keyword phrase will be used more or less frequently. This gives you a clear idea of how people think when they turn to the web to find solutions. The whole point of choosing the right keywords is to ensure that you are there to help when someone is in need of assistance.
Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. You are not alone on the web, and since there are literally swarms of websites that will try to get optimized pages just like you, there will be little or no results at all.
There is a thing called keyword ranking difficulty, and even if you choose a frequently used keyword, it won’t do you much good if it’s hard to rank for it.
In other words, don’t aim high, but aim for something more realistic. Always remember that choosing a good keyword is only one part of the job – you also need to create relevant content around it. This will be explained in the following section.
Choosing The Right Topic
As mentioned, Google doesn’t always rank pages based on keywords, but also based on topic relevance. However, it’s not simple for an AI to assess the level of relevance of a particular piece of content, so it must have some reference points for comparison. Now, here’s what you would need to do in order to reach good ranking in terms of relevance.
When Google tries to ascertain the level of relevance in your content, it compares the keywords you used with other pieces of online content that already have a higher ranking, but the same keyword targeting. Judging by what’s there, it can tell whether what you covered on your page is as valuable as the content on an already highly ranked page.
For example if you are ranking for the keyword “real estate” Google will expect to see words like “real estate economy,” “housing economy,” “housing bubble,” and “real estate agent” in its surroundings. So, when you find the right keyword, you also need to find relevant topics for that keyword, if you want your content to be deemed valuable.
Additionally, Google not only evaluates relevant topics on the page that ranked high for a particular keyword, it also ranks the topics that are commonly used all over the web when the targeted word is in question.
This means that there are websites that use the given word or phrase, but do not rank for it in particular, and these sites usually have a different set of topics surrounding that keyword.
If you can find the topics that overlap on both of these fields, you should include these in your content. For the word “real estate” such topic can be “real estate agent” since it is definitely mentioned in both types of content.
Of course, there are many other parameters that influence your ranking, but if we are talking about written content, you cannot go wrong by adhering to these tips. You will have useful content that targets both the keywords and the searcher’s intent, and therefore, you’ll have better chances of being noticed.
Even the writing style plays an important role. You need to occupy the reader’s attention and keep them on the page as long as possible, since the time spent on your page is also an important factor. So, it has become a trend to make a video and to add its transcription as part of the written page content. Clearly, the transcription needs to be done in accordance to the tips provided above. To be more precise, your video needs to speak in a way that targets both keywords and topic relevancy.
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
