In the past, it was believed that Keywords are the Gods for ranking your website high in the search engine results pages (SERPs). You are only done by stuffing your websites with the keywords. Almost all webmasters use fill their pages with specific keywords, use optimized anchor text for backlinks, add keyword rich headers and title tags and thought to rank their site pages high. This gave them positive results for some time. 

But they made mistake by undermining Google’s strategy. They forget that Google’s main goal is to provide the most relevant search engine results to its users but not only keyword manipulation. Google Overhaul its Algorithms and hit webmasters with update after update to make sure that things like keyword density would not hold the same weight in future rankings.

Also Read: seo-optimizing keywords

However, keywords aren’t completely out of order and are still in many ways the backbone of SEO. The only way to use them is just have to be approach them differently.

Now, we’ll take a look at the changed role of keywords when it comes to search engine optimization. 

Keyword Placement

The latest Google searching algorithm still requires the use of text, and hence the keyword placement strategy will still work for search engine rankings. So, keyword placement will more help you than keyword stuffing or keyword rich backlinks.

Putting your main keywords in your title and headers is still a fruitful approach for any on page SEO marketing strategy, and this will be working for few more years, till Google makes a large change in the indexing of the pages. Title tags play an essential part in search results, and poorly optimized title tags will always yield negative results.

Google still emphasizes on key areas, like Meta information and headers, followed by copy and navigation last. Therefore, you should optimize these key areas with various keywords so as to avoid duplicity of tags across your site. 

Keyword Meaning

Google is doing everything in its power for its algorithm to be more “plastic” and craft itself to the user’s needs. It is also trying to make its algorithm more brainy by not only identifying keywords and ranking them, but by deriving meaning from them as well. Google is consistently modifying its algorithm so that it can make correlations between keywords on a specific page to allow it to make idea of what the page is really about.

For example, using the same keyword phrases iteratively are less likely to get rank for different search terms as in the past. So, you shouldn’t now focus on adding specific keyword phrases to your pages and rather aim on a consistent theme throughout your site pages that will allow them to rank organically for specific keywords 

So what does it mean for SEO Marketers? 

Simply, keywords aren’t completely outdated, but our view for them needs to be changed. Instead of aiming at keywords, webmasters should focus on the human aspect of search and focus on providing quakity content rather than crafting content for machines. As technologies such as artificial Intelligence are being introduced, the gap between man and machine is consistently getting closer, and this should be an indication for SEO marketers to move towards other aspects of SEO such as user experience if they want to be more successful in the future.

Also Read: How to research for keywords