Rehashing Relevance
One of the key things in search engine optimisation is relevance. Before I discuss relevance though let me give you the dictionary definition of the word it was derived from, relevant.
relevant (adj): closely connected or appropriate to the matter at hand
Hence when talking about relevance in SEO terms what is taken into consideration is the just how relevant or closely connected the search terms entered by search engines users are to the actual contents of a web page and/or an entire website. Because of this fact SEO is definitely more than just making sure that your page has the lots of keywords and phrases but also making sure that the search engines can clearly see they are indeed highly relevant to the rest of the contents of the page.
Here are some tips to help emphasise the relevance of keywords within a page with respect to each other and the entire page’s content:
- Unless it is the homepage, make sure that each page has a theme or specific topic.
- Use a broad spectrum of keywords from the generic to the more specific and from the highly competitive to the more obscure ones.
- Jumble the words used within phrases to accommodate for different search patterns of users.
- The most important keywords should be used in the page title and the headings.
- Organise your paragraphs/sections so as to place relevant words nearer each other. The proximity of related terms will further increase the apparent relevance of the search term to the page’s contents.
- Remember that search engines are smart and getting smarter each day. Don’t try to fool them by placing hidden unrelated text (we all know what this is called!) in hopes of conning people to get to your irrelevant (to the search term) page. It will likely work but you can get caught!
- Don’t forget to put a keyword(s) on the anchor text of links and make sure that you only link to pages that have the same/similar topic.
- Don’t sweat over words with the same spelling but different meaning search engines can now (for the most part) determine what you really want to convey…especially if you did your job and followed the tips above.
Oh, and HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone!!!
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Nice post.
You could also make sure you have related images on the page with relevant alt-tags attached to them.
Also make sure you have links COMING IN to the page from relevant sites, using relevant anchor text.
That mixed in with the points above will definitely build up your site/pages relevancy.
Thanks Marc - Good advice!!
Relevance of links is very important. Getting links from relevant authority sites in you niche is of paramount importance if you want the search engine bots to eventually begin seeing your pages as authoritative too, and bestow the accolades of improved PageRank on them.
Great post on relevance. One of the nice things about our service, ClickSprout, is that we post fresh, daily, relevant content including a website’s keywords and other relevant content to websites and blogs across the Internet. This creates backlinks to a website which is another great tool for search engine optimization.
I always (like, maybe not the right word) what you say it brings relevant SEO to forefront of my thoughts. Just recently though I seemed to have reached a paradox in my thought process which is ‘the more I understand the less I seem to know’.
Relevance is always important in SEO because this may help the target user to find what they are looking for.So I considered doing it in a right way is the safest thing.Using the anchor text keywords it may help the user to find what are the content of the site.