‘A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet‘ – Shakespeare penned, lending his words to the tragic Juliet. It’s quite possible that an angst-ridden, pimply-faced teenage Romeo wasn’t really deserving of such poetry, but the Bard was right about one thing. There are many different words we can use to describe the same thing. This is something to keep in mind for your SEO.
Site owners frequently get caught up on the ‘keywords = rankings‘ idea. This is something that you have to get past in modern search engine optimisation. Although keyword selection is one of the most important SEO jobs, the list should include related terms. You’re going to have a much easier time of it if you broaden your net when it comes to keywords, and a more successful time when it comes to increasing traffic levels.
What keywords do is establish your site’s relevance to the search query. The search engine algorithms are smart enough these days to detect words that are related to your keywords, semantic markup. In fact, the search engines look for words related to the search term to establish that a page is truly relevant to the query, and not just the product of thorough SEO. For a page to be a success, it needs to feature a number of words that are grouped around the central keyword. By going too heavy with your SEO and focussing just on your refined list of selected keywords, you may as well stick a big red sign on your website that says ‘SEO here’.
In looking at your keyword list, consider synonyms and other related words. Having a list of related keywords at your disposal makes things a lot easier. Content becomes smoother, reading becomes easier for your site users and the search engines end up happier – and when they’re happy with your website, you’ll be happy with the search engine results pages.
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