Keywords and Google

by 13 replies
15
I was just reviewing several threads about finding keywords and it got me to thinking.

Does Google even care about keywords?
Do keywords actually hurt your site with Google?

From my experience (most recently with a new site) it appears that if your keyword is "blue dotted widgets" and you use those keywords in the domain (blue-dotted-widgets . com), the title (All About Blue Dotted Widgets), the description (How blue dotted widgets make your life better.), sprinkle the words "blue dotted widgets" several times in the content, and for good measure put in a meta keyword tag (even though Google doesn't read the tag) with "blue dotted widgets", somehow or another Google will decide that you are lying and that your site is not about blue dotted widgets, but is actually spam or a porn site or something.

Yesterday, I typed into Google search a single unique word that is applicable and used (to the best of my knowledge) in only 2 websites. Google returned the other site and a host of unrelated sites. My site is indexed with over 75 pages, but it does not show up at all in Google for this single unique word. When I typed the word into Bing search, it returned both my website and the other website.

Again does G even care about keywords and do they actually hurt you with G?
#search engine optimization #google #keywords
  • Banned
    Your talking about optimization which can be controlled, that's up to you.

    Something like best-insurance-rates-atlanta.com is obvious spam.
    • [1] reply
    • I am not really talking about optimization. My point is that, to me, it appears that you can do everything that you can do to say what a website is about (the keywords), but Google will not believe you and will pick out from your website whatever it wants, no matter how trivial, to say what your site is about. Google will completely disregard your choice of and emphasis on certain keywords.

      For instance, Google may well say that your website is about shoes and list your website in the "shoe" search returns just because you say somewhere in the content that "blue dotted widgets are not shoes". And you may not even mention shoes anywhere else on the website. The fact that you focus on the certain keywords doesn't phase Google and may actually cause Google to suspect that you are lying.
      • [1] reply
  • The keywords your website contains are what Google will think your website is about. So stop assuming that Google would think you are lying and that your website is about something else. Just keep optimising your site and be careful to avoid over-optimisation.
    • [1] reply
    • The very first thing that every guru or seo expert will tell you is to start by finding the right "keywords". I am now questioning whether or not this is true.

      What I have seen in practice is that Google picks and chooses its' own "keywords" for every website page and Google does not care what the website creator says.

      Since Google disregards what website creators say via url, title, description, etc., I can only believe that Google assumes that every website creator is lying about his/her site.
  • Keyword research is most important in SEO. I think for SEO right Keywords research is most important.
    • [1] reply
    • Why do you say that?

      I agree that keyword research should lead you to a workable niche. But trying to target specific keywords seems to me to be a waste of time. Google doesn't care what keywords you are targeting or even what you think your website is about. Google will decide on its' own what it thinks your keywords are and what your site is about.

      As part evidence of what I am saying, Google does not even read the keyword meta tag. If they cared about what you are trying to target, they would use the keyword meta tag.
      • [1] reply
  • Google now looks at the entire domain in context, not just individual pages. If you are not ranking for that unique term, you need to use it more throughout your entire domain—but only if that keyword is relevant to your domain.

    They don't want to rank a page about yellow widgets that belongs to a site that's about blue whatcha call its.


    You should probably also focus on longtail keywords. Focus on the search string your visitors might put into Google to find your pages.
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