I’ve spent several hours researching the current best practices for SEO (search engine optimization) in 2017, and one thing that is standing out as a relatively new development is that Google is trying to de-emphasize the importance and overuse of keywords. If you spend any time learning about SEO, the most common topic is probably how to get a high Google ranking by targeting the keywords you want to rank for in your title, within your content, and in the links to your site.
In the most recent Google search engine updates, it sounds like Google may even be punishing sites that have too many links to them with the same keywords, or too many instances of a a keyword on a page. From their perspective I think this makes sense as they are trying to discourage over-optimization to certain keywords and encourage and reward more natural content and link-building. I imagine that as Google gets better at meta-analysis they will move more towards an algorithm that identifies the subject matter and topics on a given site and tries to match keyword searches to websites based on their meta-analysis and rely less on exact keyword matches.
Here are some other tips I gathered from my research:
1. Time on website – Google is placing more weight on how much time users spend at a website after they click it in the search results, as they believe this is an indicator of the quality and relevance of a site to the user’s search query.
2. CTR (click-through-rate) – Google will tend to move sites up in the rankings that are getting more clicks than expected based on their position. For example, if they expect a site at #9 to get 2% of clicks but it is getting 10%, they will move it up and see if user’s continue to favor it.
3. Keywords in Key Areas – Although Google may be de-emphasizing keywords in some ways, they still put a lot of weight in the keywords in the site URL,tag, and to a lesser extent thetag.
4. Frequent Updates – Google likes sites that are updated frequently as this is a good indicator of quality content.
5. Check Related Searches – Do a search for some of the keywords you are targeting and check the ‘related searches’ near the bottom of the results. that will give you an idea of other keywords or phrases you might want to target or run ads for.
6. Analyze Adwords Ads – Adwords Ads (the Google ads that show up when you do a search) are generally highly optimized to get users to click on them. The advertisers have a often spent a lot of time and money trying to find what words and phrases attract users, so leverage all their research by looking at what words and phrases are used in the ads. For example, I did a search for ‘make money from home online’; one thing I notice is that all 3 of the ads I’m seeing are mentioning something about how much money you can make. One says, ‘Earn $1000+ in 90 days’. Another has, ‘$18-$42/hour work at home jobs’.