Are Keywords Important in Today’s Search?

Today’s SEO professionals will know how much has changed over the last decade, and we expect no difference from 2020 to 2030.

Back in 2010 we had never heard of Google updates such as the Panda, RankBrain, Bert, or Hummingbird, and the majority of SEO’s thought that SEO content entailed the following:

• Adding a target keyword and longtail so many times
• Title tag, meta description, H1, etc.
• Writing at least so many words per page to rank

Now the algorithm has changed for the better.

As every search engine compliant SEO knows, making sure a website ranks high in the search results is not a matter of manipulating the search engines. It is about providing rich content for the users of the website, so they can make a well informed decision about a product or services, or read a well researched article, which will help them in their studies.

How should keywords be placed?

Here we will explain what content written on search engines should include.

What Is SEO Content?

SEO content is written to show high on the search engines, it means that the content is classed as high value, and informative.

An SEO will however also write in a way the search engines will be favorable of placing the content higher than normal content.

Why?

This is because an SEO will know how to let the search engine bot what to do with the content in a technical manner.

After all the search engine algorithm is programmed to help the searcher find the best content available. So the SEO content writer has to think about this when they are creating content.

But, as you may have guessed creating effective content for the search engines is not as simple as writing brilliant content that will help the reader.

So please read on.

How to Make Content SEO Friendly?

SEO content can be described as content that answers a reader’s questions, in a fashion that is clear, and concise. This content also needs to be written in a professional manner, with good grammar.

Content That Answers the Searcher’s Questions

SEO friendly content is content that answers a reader’s questions clearly

This means that the content genre that a reader is searching for will answer all of the questions that a reader wants to know about the subject.

If a searcher performs a search on the search engines they will come across an article written just for the search engines, these may make little sense, and include a lot of stuffed keywords. This content is written to attract page visits in the hope the reader will navigate through the site, to read other information. A professional SEO will not write such articles. Also, there are pages created to attract thought leadership, to break news, and other pages are written to attract social engagement.

An SEO will write content for a lot of purposes, so depending on the use of the page, we do not always require high page rankings.

Clear & Comprehensive Content

When asking a question, the preferred answer is clear and straightforward. Not an answer that is vague, and clunky.

This is exactly how the search engines think.

But the topic of grammar is not an exciting discussion, most SEO’s would prefer to talk about natural language processing.

As most business people know, no matter how much a writer of a brief has researched their project, it can be ruined by poor content, so good content matters.

High E-A-T Content

What is E-A-T, it means Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. This is a very important topic in the SEO industry.

So, to sum up SEO friendly content. SEO friendly content is content that answers a reader’s questions on the subject they are researching. It should answer a reader’s questions fully, clearly, and comprehensively. This content should also portray a high degree of authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

The Importance of Keywords for SEO?

Keywords are not to be looked at a way of programming a search engine to award your content with authority page rankings. Keywords need to be addressed as words that answer questions and join sentences together. In all reality, a good content writer will not have to worry about the percentage of keywords they have included in an article. If the article written is of high quality and answers a reader’s questions correctly, the content will be deemed as high value and the content will incur high page rankings on the search engines.

BERT & Google’s History with Keywords

The BERT update released by Google is programmed to try to understand human written language.

This update is not perfect, but it is a great start to artificial intelligence in search queries.

The Panda update was released in 2011, this was a brilliant update and helped improve the quality of web pages indexed on the search engine.

The Hummingbird update was released in 2013, focused on understanding words and queries, rather than ranking websites with keywords.

The RankBrain update was released by Google in 2015 to rank confusing pages on its search engine.

The brilliance of the Google search engine platform is now that we have the BERT update, researchers of Google can now enter human sentences rather than keyword type robot searches.

Googles original mission was to create a platform where searchers could easily find good quality content, now with technological advances that mission is easier to do.