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Become An Instant SEO Forum Expert! by: Brad Callen Today I'm going to try something different. For quite some time now I've noticed that the same questions have been asked over and over again in search engine forums. In this article I've tried to pick out the most frequent of those questions and then answer them. Hopefully you'll find some of your questions answered in here, and if you don't, you can always drop me a line and ask'¦I might put out a similar Q&A lesson soon in the future, so your questions will definitely get answered here. So, let's get started. 1 - What is 'relevance' in SEO? 'Relevance' is a central concept in search engine marketing, but you will be hard pressed to find any reasonable definition for it. Most SEO experts take the term for granted, and the rest of us just nod along :-) It is not very complicated, but it does involve some very core ideas, so listen closely. In SEO, relevance is a criteria used by search engines to determine the importance of a target (page, keyword, website) within a niche. Since search engines are primarily concerned with serving user queries, the role of relevance comes up most often during searches. For example, if I search for the term 'search marketing' on Google, the search engine will analyse its index and provide me a list of web pages ranked by how 'relevant' they are to 'search marketing' ' in this case the top result is www.overture.com, now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing. Note that search engines don't explicitly deal with niches or categories of websites. Instead, an SE treats the Internet as a loosely defined grouping of topical pages, with those topics forming sub-groups of their own. Search Engines and Relevance Search engines assume that websites in general will follow the mantra of 'information-targeting', with the ideal website in a niche being the one that is most relevant to that niche. Sounds simple, right? Here is where it gets interesting. Search engines measure relevance on different levels, or different categories if you may. Once you understand the above definition, they all make sense by themselves. For starters, there is content relevance ' is this page's content relevant to a search query (and that query's projected niche)? This is where on-page optimization is so important. Search engines use keywords to measure relevance, but they aren't checking for keyword density; in fact, they are checking for keyword placement in the page. A second criteria is link relevance ' whether the sites linking to you are 'relevant' ' i.e. in the same niche (or closely related to the niche), and whether the sites YOU link to are relevant as well. This is, in a nutshell, off-page optimization or link-building. Relevance in search engine optimization has been the biggest stumbling block for webmasters ' the concept is so important that every aspect of SEO is governed by it, but yet so obvious that many of us overlook it. 2 - How useful is Keyword Density? Keyword density was once the single most important criteria for judging the value of a webpage. I'm talking back in the pre-Google era (now if THAT doesn't give you a hint about how outdated keyword density is'¦). However, with Google's PageRank algorithm and the general trend towards off-page factors determining more and more of your website's rankings ' the importance of keyword density as an on-page optimization tool diminished. People continued to theorize about what the ideal keyword density should be, and estimates ranged from 2% to 8%. Keyword density, in case you are wondering, is measured by the following formula: Keyword Density Formula d = x / y where: x = No. of times a keyword is used in a block of content (page) y = total word count of the page d = keyword density The problem with keyword density is quite simple ' it is very, very easy to manipulate and spam. Spammers used automated content generators to create highly optimized web pages with high keyword densities. As search engines started to set limits on 'acceptable' keyword density, spammers got smarter and smarter and reduced their keyword density as well, making it especially hard for search engines to separate spam content from genuine, useful content. Search Engines and Keyword Density Since search engines could not conceivably check every page manually (As a rough estimate, Google indexes 8.1 billion pages ' and pages are added daily), and they couldn't tolerate spam in their search results, search engines devalued keyword density as a ranking tool. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if keyword density did NOT affect your rankings ' in fact, keyword positioning (placing the keywords in title tags and header tags) as well as thematic keyword relevance (a fancy term that refers to how related your core keywords are to your website's main theme or niche) is far more important in terms of on-page optimization. And that, of course, pales in comparison to how important off-page optimization, or link building, is. So, if possible, ignore the bounds of keyword density and focus on the following: Good, useful, quality content Keyword positioning Keyword relevance And once you're done with the basics, move on to the next page (or start building links). 3 - Do web pages need a minimum number of words to be ranked well by search engines? There's a myth going around in some search engine forums that you should have a minimum word count for web pages to satisfy search engine requirements. Let's put that myth to rest ' there's no minimum requirement for web pages to rank well ' in fact, there are many, many web pages that rank at the top position for highly competitive terms WITHOUT having too many words on them ' for example, a search for the term 'resume samples' on Google gives a top result of a page that has ONLY links on it ' no serious content. This is a highly competitive term with over '150
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