Ought to You Just Ignore Keywords When Writing Content For website positioning?

Few marketing strategies have gone through as much evolution and development as search engine optimization (SEO). It’s been around as long as search engines, however the modern approach is radically different from what people did in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Back then, the SEO game was all about keywords. Pick the right keywords for your strategy, stick them in every nook and cranny of your website, and eventually you would probably rank decently on searches that match those keywords.

Today? Ranking for target keywords isn’t nearly as simple or easy. So should target keywords disappear from your campaign altogether?

Absolute SEO basics

In case you are not familiar with SEO, here is a basic overview. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about improving the ranking of your website on the Search Results Pages (SERPs) for search queries that are relevant to your business. With a good strategy, you will rank higher, eventually get more visibility, and get more traffic.

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To do this, you need to do several things, such as: B. improve the technical structure of your website, write a lot of content on the website and earn backlinks. Historically, however, one of the most important pieces of the puzzle has been choosing “target keywords” for your strategy – specific queries that you think your target audience will use for companies like yours. Keywords with high traffic and minimal competition were low hanging fruits. With a sufficiently targeted approach, you could dominate the rankings for that term and earn tons of traffic.

Keyword stuffing battle and the semantic search apocalypse

Why the hate for keywords?

It’s not really hate. Just a new perspective. You see, in the 2000s, companies around the world were practicing a tactic called “Keyword stuffing. ”They invited keywords into every piece of content on their website, regardless of whether it made sense. Whole pages were devoted to spamming the same word or phrase over and over – and sometimes people would “hide” keywords in the background of a page.

Why? Because if you’ve spammed a keyword enough, you could probably rank for it.

That soon changed, however, when Google released a series of updates designed to punish keyword spammers and reward pages with quality written content. Little by little, keyword stufferers realized that their tactics were no longer effective and they began to update their strategies accordingly.

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In this era, the predominant strategy was to optimize for “Keyword density. “It was a clever way of playing the system. Authors knew that a keyword occurring too often would trigger a red flag on Google. So they calculated that if the word appeared a certain number of times that was perfectly proportional to the rest of the content, it would optimize the content for that keyword without being flagged as spam.

The 2013 Hummingbird update made things even more complicated, with Google introducing “semantic search” features that have been refined over the years. In essence, Google started out not just with literal words and phrases, but with the context of all written content. It started out by scoring user queries based on intent and subjective meaning, rather than analyzing queries as exact words, and similarly started scoring on-site content.

Because of this change, it is hypothetically possible to rank for a keyword that never appears on your website. If your website has high domain authority and writes content related to a specific topic, even if you only use synonyms and descriptive text to cover that topic, you can easily find success.

Does that mean you should give up target keywords entirely?

The modern relevance of keywords

In today’s SEO, the functional role of keywords has not gone away; instead it evolved. Keywords were once a tool that you could use to work in your content to get a specific result. Today they are more of a driving force in your strategy.

It is important to do keyword research so that you better understand your competition, your user intent, and even the flow of web searches and traffic. Once you understand the keywords and phrases your users are looking for and your competitors’ rankings, you can choose your goals and base your strategy on them.

The big difference is that it’s not really worth practicing consistent keyword density optimization these days – and keyword stuffing is definitely a no-go. In fact, your target keywords should only appear a few times in the content you optimize for them. Instead, you should focus on producing the best possible content and writing in a way that is both informative and natural. With better content and higher user attractiveness (combined with a link building and content outreach strategy), you shouldn’t have any problems ranking for the target queries you want – while avoiding Google penalties.