Ever since the early days of the internet, webmasters have been preoccupied with finding ways to make their sites rank highly on search engines.
At one point, the best way to do this was a practice called keyword stuffing: simply having a certain string of keywords, like “beach umbrellas Miami”, repeated until it represented around 10 per cent of an entire article was enough to get it to appear on a search engine results page. Naturally, this led to some very poorly written articles, with keyword strings mashed into all sorts of uncomfortable and inappropriate places.
Updates to Google’s search algorithm, most notably the Panda series of updates that started in 2011, changed all of that. Suddenly, Google’s crawler understood an article’s context, and ranked pieces of content according to how well it addressed the intent of a certain search query, rather than simply how many times a keyword was repeated in the piece. Google began to rank sites based on how well they were built, how long users stayed on them, and most importantly, how good their content was. Naturally, sites that depended solely on keyword stuffing quickly fell from search results pages.、
If you’re a webmaster and want to prevent your site from becoming consigned to the internet’s waste bin, here are some tips for improving your site’s performance on search engines. These tips are some of the most commonly recommended by an SEO agency Singapore residents trust.
Consider Your Keyword Placement
While keyword stuffing has become a thing of the past as far as search ranking factors are concerned, keywords themselves remain an important part of smart content strategy and onsite search engine optimization (SEO). However, their role has changed slightly over the years, and now, keywords are more valuable as topics as far as onpage SEO is concerned.
Google ranks pieces of content depending on how relevant and authoritative they are about a particular topic, which also happens to be the search query that the user typed into the search bar. Many content experiments have demonstrated that pieces of content that have the search query placed within the first 100 words of the piece perform better than those that do not. This is because Google’s algorithm expects well-written content to explicitly state what it’s about right at the beginning of the piece. Given that this expectation is aligned with standard rules for composition, it’s a good idea, both from an SEO and a compositional standpoint, to make sure that the keyword, AKA the search query, is located at the start of the piece of content.
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